May 2014: Some news about the Cozy Project

[Frank Rousseau]

Hi all,

Here are the latest news about the Cozy project:

Community

The community was very helpful in May with more issues and more bug fixes.

- vaz-ar (https://github.com/vaz-ar) tried a manual installation of Cozy on his Pi and while he was pretty successful, he encountered bugs and fixed it.

- Marc Poulihès (https://github.com/dkm) reported many bugs in the Files and Photos applications

- Florent Fayolle (https://github.com/fflorent) reported small bugs in Cozy Manager and documentation improvements.

- Bnj (https://github.com/bnjbvr) helped others on the mailing list or IRC, submitting issues for Calendar and the PFM.

You are always more numerous helping us. We are very grateful for that, thank you! 

Files Application

The "Files" board: https://trello.com/b/dEKbbCa5/focus-sprint-files

There were many many changes to the Files application, here are the major ones:

- Romain improved "cozy-clearance", a library to add sharing capabilities to a Cozy app.

- Romain improved the upload process and modal styles.
- Romain polished the Android application.
- Joseph improved sharing emails (styles and content) and localized them.

- Joseph made the "share" icon changing depending on the sharing mode (public, private or shared with x people).

- Joseph added a "share" icon to the current folder view.

- Zoé did testing and debugging for big file uploads. She fixed some but there are still issues.
- Zoé worked on the Linux/OSX client (still will WIP).

- Frank cleaned and refactored code of the web API.
- Frank improved styling (buttons, tags, icons, ...)

- Frank made tags "clickable" (it triggers a search)

You can find a more visual and friendly description of changes in our blog post: http://blog.cozycloud.cc/news/2014/05/20/files-new-release/

Docker exeperiment

We've started some R&D on a Cozy based on Docker (https://www.docker.io/). We aim at replacing our current controller, built on Haibu (https://github.com/nodejitsu/haibu) with a new one based on Docker. The Controller is the component in charge of managing the Cozy applications.

Docker would allow us to improve app isolation, to make the application deployment simpler and to take advantage of the Docker Registry (image repository). It would also allow us to deploy applications based on any kind of technology (Python, Ruby, Go, ...).

But it's still an experiment because Docker doesn't work well with ARM processors and we don't know yet the impact on the resource consumption.

Romain and Zoé have been very busy with it and we hope we'll be able to give you the tools to test it out in the next few days.

- Romain built a new controller that can start, stop, install, uninstall and update docker images

- Zoé created an HTTP API to control the controller

- Zoé created a CLI tool to control the controller

- Frank and Lucas looked at hosting our own Docker registry (repository of docker images)

Kanban: https://trello.com/b/yw9Cck3s/labs-docker-https-pad-lucs-fr-p-docker-https-github-com-mycozycloud-labs-controller

Let us know what you think about it!

Others

- Zoé added a route in the proxy to know how much disk space is used/left in the Cozy

- Zoé improved device management in the Data System and Proxy

- Romain fixed a bug in cozy-webdav about authentication

- Joseph made the auto-complete for tags in Contacts and Files to use the /tags API (all the tags in your Cozy).

Work In Progress

Today, we are mainly working on debugging stuff on the Cozy platform. But we will soon go back working on our Files application and its clients.

Issues to watch

We have many issues opened. You could help us defining our priorities by adding a +1 to the issues you would like to see fixed. Here is the list of the hottest issues:

- Files issues (https://github.com/mycozycloud/cozy-files/issues?state=open)

- Emails sender should not be done on the user email domain (https://github.com/mycozycloud/cozy-data-system/issues/84)

- Support reminders for events (and sync them) (https://github.com/mycozycloud/cozy-calendar/issues/97)

- Alarms do not trigger notification Home if the email option is also selected (https://github.com/mycozycloud/cozy-home/issues/179)

- Photos issues (https://github.com/mycozycloud/cozy-photos/issues)

Thank you for your attention,

Frank