nickvergessen

Joas Schilling

Nextcloud Software Engineer

Public key: 31B0 B117 C3A8 2811 6B83 345C 7076 EA97 51AA CDDA

Nextcloud 2018
January 10, 2018

Inspired by Christoph Wurst’s Nextcloud 2018 blog post, I decided to write one myself: My personal goals for Nextcloud in 2018.

More features! - Less apps?

I have always been a fan of apps. Apps are cool! They can be released indepent from the server release cycle, to get out a quick fix fast and easy. They can be written for maintenance versions which do not allow new features. And many more …

But at least two apps jump into my mind, which should not be apps themselves:

Can I update?

“Can I update?” is a little app, which checks if all your apps have a version available for the next feature release of Nextcloud. That’s a great feature, but everyone should see this, not only people that know that there could be an app for this in the app store.

Instead the app should be merged into the “Update notifications” app which is shipped with the server by default.

When the “Update notifications” app notifies you about a new version, it should automatically check if your apps are ready for that. It could then also re-notify you later when all apps finally have an update available for the new version.

Admin notifications

The “Admin notifications” is a similar story. It allows to generate generic notifications (which might be independent from Nextcloud itself). One example are available system updates.

The reason why this was not done as part of the Notifications app in first place, is that I wanted to have it now and not in 4 months when the next features were to be released with the new Nextcloud version. That is okay, but it should be merged into the Notifications app now, so anyone can use the CLI command and the OCS API endpoint to generate new notifications (but don’t use this in your Nextcloud app, if you have a Nextcloud app, see visit the docs of the notifications app).

Revisit the activity app

My second goal is to revisit the activity app. I have some ideas in my mind which should be implemented, to bring the app on a new level:

  • Look ahead: Similar to twitter a “X new things happened” line should pop up, when stuff happens while you are on the activity page
  • Unread count on page title: as a follow up to the “Look ahead” the unread count should be shown in the page title of your browser, so you can quickly see that something happened.
  • Better HTML emails: HTML emails have been improved and brought to the default layout with Nextcloud 13, but e.g. file names are still not linked to the file in emails.
  • Search: It would be nice if you could search your stream easily for some keywords.
  • Disable a type from stream: Similar to options on Facebook, it would be nice if you can disable e.g. “Changed files” from within the stream. In the future no more changed files would show up in your stream.
  • Disable a file(item) from stream: Some files just change too often, or are irrelevant. Like with the type above, it should be possible to do this e.g. with a “…” menu in the item in your stream.

That should be it, might even be too much already to fit in one year, but at least it is something like a guideline for my thoughts and moments of free time 🤓