Nextcloud Text is perfect for note-taking, outlines and templates and it is also used in some other apps like Collectives for the text editing component. When you want to work in a simple and uncluttered environment, Text is your ideal choice. It offers a variety of rich formatting options without the more advanced functionalities of a complete office app like Writer in Nextcloud Office. The Text App saves its files as ‘markdown’ files which is very popular among writers, bloggers and techies alike.

Calling all developers!

Like any app, Text gets regular updates, bug fixing and development, and it is a great place to get started contributing to Nextcloud! Several Nextcloud developers, like Max and Jonas who developed the Collectives app, got their first contributions to Nextcloud in through Text. And if you get involved, you’ll certainly encounter them, triaging issues and fixing bugs!

Do you:

• Already have experience programming?
• Are familiar with tools y.js, vue.js and tiptap?
• Curious to learn about new technologies?

Then you should contribute to the Text App!

The tools being used (y.js, vue.js, tiptap) are all built by people who know their craft, have looked into the problems in depth, and found innovative solutions which makes Text a great place to learn how to build up code for those with some experience in programming.

About y.js

y.js was implemented to solve the problem of merging conflicts while collaborative editing. Dealing with these conflicts is a very interesting challenge that people have studied for decades. The requirement for combining the changes of different people was to have a certain order: the changes of person A would be merged first, then the changes of person B, etc., even if the changes of person A and B were made at the same time. The order has to be respected. This means the submission of the changes was often out of order, changes had to be resubmitted, and the user experience was not smooth. y.js was invented between 2016 and 2020 as part of a research project, and it became the first widely used implementation of a CRDT (conflict-free replicated data types) algorithm for shared editing. CRDTs allow collaborating without worrying about the resolution of conflicts. This means we can allow accepting the changes even if they arrive in different orders. The implementation of y.js in Text resulted in great improvements for the performance and user experience.

Getting started

In the Text repository, there’s a very accessible entry-point for new contributors: all issues are triaged, feedback on pull requests is provided fast, and the team is continuously investing in reducing technical debt.

To get started, a variety of ‘good first issues’ are ready for you! Some of the issues just require a one line change in the code and are a very accessible starting point to get some confidence, while other issues are detailed and provide a great chance to learn how the code is structured. Overall, all issues contain elaborate explanations and help is available if you get stuck!

With that, let’s get going!

The post Contribute to the Text app: the hidden gem! appeared first on Nextcloud.

The Developer Tutorial Series is a program where we help developers improve their coding skills by providing them the tools and step-by-step guides on a variety of topics to succeed.

Nextcloud Dashboard

The Dashboard is where you start your day. You have your cup of coffee or tea in hand, and are ready to start your work.

Who messaged you? Do you have an important email to answer? With Nextcloud Dashboard, you have a quick overview of everything happening in your Nextcloud and can get a productive head start to your day. It makes it easy to pick up where you left off on a project through the Deck widget, for example, or an upcoming Task.

There’s a whole variety of widgets to choose from, and with some practice you can even make your own!

Start Customizing your own Widget!

Have an idea for a new widget on your dashboard? After completing our fourth tutorial, you will know how to create widgets in Vue.js, an open source, front-end JavaScript model.

Vue.js is mainly utilized for building user interfaces and single-page applications and is known to be a progressive and approachable framework. Learn more about Vue.js here.

In the written tutorial, we first teach you how to create a simple dashboard widget using pure (or vanilla) Javascript and then you will learn how to do it successfully on Vue.js.

We hope you learn from and have fun with this tutorial!

If you have any questions or want to share your new widget, post in the forums!

The post Developer Tutorial #4: Create Dashboard Widgets with Vue.js appeared first on Nextcloud.

Nimisha has been working with Nextcloud for almost 2 years now, starting off as a contributor and then joining the company soon after.

She joins us today to talk about the journey that led to the new Nextcloud Photos we all know and love!

Even before this release, the Photos app was just a place for viewing photos on your instance. It’s safe to say the Photos app was well-loved by the community, with so many of you using it to keep your memories safe, secure and within your reach.

The most recent release of Nextcloud brought with it the biggest overhaul for the humble Photos app, including a photo editor, collaborative albums, and even face and object recognition!

The journey to Photos 2.0

There has always been a tremendous amount of activity around the Photos app in the community. The forums were always abuzz with ideas for new features that could be implemented and old features that weren’t so useful anymore. So as we were swept up in the flurry of brainstorming on how to make this the biggest Nextcloud update ever, help.nextcloud.com was what we turned to!

The initial vision for Photos from Frank was a base. This issue from 2019 holds the original idea for what Photos could be. Then we searched the forum and issue tracker for the most requested features of Photos.

Collaborative albums

Collaborative albums was a big one. Many people mentioned that this was the one thing that was keeping them from switching over to Nextcloud completely. There were multiple, well-thought out designs for how albums could work, as well as some who just thought albums already existed, so it was an obvious contender for a new feature.

Face and object recognition

Face and object recognition was super popular among requests. Although in 2019 it seemed like an advanced futuristic feature, with Marcel’s Recognize app, the dilemma seemed to have been solved where choosing between privacy and the convenience of machine-based categorization became obsolete — why not have both! Read more about face recognition and the Recognize app here.

Issues that were low on the priority list jumped up into focus. A dynamic grid view, where the photo grid doesn’t contain a fixed number of columns for each row, was a feature request that was exactly in alignment with the idea of the Photos refresh.

Photo editing

We also examined the main competitor to the existing Photos app – Google Photos – to see if there were any essential features that would bridge the gap. One interesting feature was the ability to edit photos. While a full-blown photo editor was not a widely requested feature, many people did mention the process of cropping and rotating pictures to be a cumbersome one (see here). Upon further investigation of the implementation of this functionality, we found that it was actually quite easy to have a fully-fledged editor using the open source library called Filerobot Image Editor, and so it went onto the final feature list!

All these improvements were possible because of you, the community. We would like to thank everyone who participated in the discussions towards making Photos, and everyone who participated in building, testing and giving feedback on the new Photos app as well.

Be part of the next improvement!

Want to get more involved? Check out our issue tracker on Github or start a new discussion on this forum! We are always excited about listening to your ideas!

The post How we got to the new Nextcloud Photos appeared first on Nextcloud.

1. Links transform to widgets

In your Talk chats, sent links instantly transform into widgets that provide a rich view of what you sent. This can be webpage previews, videos, documents, Deck cards and more. They’re much gentler on the eye and pop out so you won’t miss another link or task again.

Watch our recording “Overview of Nextcloud Talk” to learn more about the full potential of Nextcloud Talk!

Watch this webinar

2. Create a poll in the chat

You can create a poll directly in Talk messaging!

In a group chat, simply click on the paper clip to the left of the chat bar and find the “create new poll” option. Create a question and add as many answers as you want.

Ideas for polls:

1. Ask how your teams day is going
2. Ask when your team can do a holiday dinner
3. Ask when it’s best to re-schedule a team call

Polls are a great way to interact with your team and get fast results for decision making on a daily basis!

3. Digital well-being options

In today’s digital reality, there’s countless distractions coming in from all directions keeping you away from the actual work you need to do, as well as creating an overwhelming work environment. While keeping your mental health in mind, we have a few options for you:

1. Select call notifications – If you want to start a call within a big group chat but only need to notify a few people, you can select participants individually and send them a call notification. This avoids disturbing others who don’t need to join.

2. Send a message without a notification – Sometimes messages aren’t urgent, and you don’t want to disturb a colleague.

3. Do-not-disturb button – Everyone needs one of these! In your Nextcloud settings, automatically enable a do-not-disturb option outside of the working hours you choose.

4. Expiration for chat messages

In your Talk chat’s settings, you can enable message expiration for 1 hour, 8 hours, 1 day, 1 week or 4 weeks. This is a great option if you would like all messages in a chat to be deleted after a certain period of time for:

Confidential conversations

Everyday, informal conversations that aren’t important

Short-term projects

Overall, the message expiration option acts as an “automatic” clean-up for messages in a chat, however you always have the choice to manually delete entire messages or delete the chat itself.

5. Integrates with Deck and Office

Deck

Since Nextcloud is an all-in-one collaboration platform, our goal is to deeply integrate our apps with each other so you can work more efficiently in one place. For instance, if you’re working in Deck and want to share a card with a colleague right there and then, you simply click “post to a conversation” and it will instantly be posted to a Talk chat of your choice and show up as a widget.

Office

Did you know you can create a new file, spreadsheet or presentation right within your chat?

Say you’re messaging your manager who is talking about a new strategy and you get a great idea. Before you forget your thought, quickly open a new text file within your chat and jot down your notes. Efficient and simple.

Everything new in Talk in Nextcloud Hub 3!

Nextcloud Reviews

The post 5 features in Nextcloud Talk you didn’t know about appeared first on Nextcloud.

Perhaps the Cookbook app brought you joy to store all your favorite recipes, or the Bookmarks app helped you organize your favorite websites.

But what if you have the best idea for an app that would help you and others, but nobody has done it yet?

What if we told you YOU could develop one yourself?

Well, we are happy to announce that we now offer Nextcloud App development tutorials!

Nextcloud App development tutorials

It’s hard to get into the coding world sometimes even with all the information out there.

Tutorials offered online are often very hard and stressful to follow and leave you feeling defeated and disappointed.

We are offering a different approach.

Our tutorials are:

• Written in a language that does not assume pre-knowledge
• Meant to enable any developer who wants to enter into the world of Nextcloud
• Tested by someone who is not a developer, to ensure the tutorials are easy to follow

So if you lack extensive coding experience or are hesitant to start, we are providing you with all the guidance, instructions and support you need in these new tutorials.

What’s inside?

In the Nextcloud folder – Nextcloud app development tutorials final – we are providing tutorials for:

• Setting up a development environment
  • Tutorial for Mac
  • Tutorial for Ubuntu
• Developing a simple files plugin

More coming soon!

We love to support our community

We really want to provide our community members the best experience possible, especially if it’s their first attempt at a Nextcloud coding project! Our goal is that these tutorials put you at ease and help flatten the learning curve.

See what some participants have already said about our development tutorials:

“Great job! This is certainly a much better experience than I had bootstrapping my first app back then. Very approachable .”

– theCalcaholic , NextcloudPi Developer

“Thank you so much. This is really very helpful for me. I am looking forward to further tutorials.”

– olheem

Already an expert?

Help the next generation of #Nextcloud app developers and contribute to this project!

We need:

• Create tutorials about setting up a development environment in the same format for other operating systems
• Help with answering the questions that arrive on the forum posts [1] [2]

The post Nextcloud App Development Tutorials: 1 step closer to creating an app! appeared first on Nextcloud.

The organizational chart the team created is a new feature of the Nextcloud Contacts App. Using just one open source library, you can have an entire organizational chart be created in seconds from your contacts list.

Starting with the head of the organization or company, a list of employees under different heads, managers, and teams can all be made into a visual dream.

The organizational chart is perfect for the HR manager or team of any organization or business, as it works swiftly and is a place that can keep track of all the changes in staffing occuring all the time. For other employees in the organization, it’s a great visual to understand the hierachy in the organization and to be able to play around with the different teams and their leaders.

Visually appealing, interactive, and versatile, this new organizational chart is a must have! No more manual work, it’s now all automatic and easy, thanks to our hackers.

Also available is a single pull request for the code from the Contacts app.

To hear it from the team lead herself, watch the demo video below!

This feature is available now in the Contacts app. The team already has an open GitHub for improvements.

Under the team lead Shieva Saavedra, Manuel Castro, Juan Manuel Tejonero Valdes, Alba Real Aragón, and Vassilis Kritharakis all received the 2nd prize at the NextGov Hackathon and were awarded €3,500 for their time, efforts, and talents in creating the new Contacts feature. We thank them all for their work and dedication at the event, and in improving Nextcloud which in turn will hope to encourage public administrations to switch to more secure, open source cloud solutions.

Stay tuned for features of the rest of the winners on #AppTuesday!

The post 2nd Prize Hackathon Winner Creates Organizational Chart Feature in Contacts appeared first on Nextcloud.

At our recent NextGov Hackathon, Arne Hamann from Germany had a clear goal for his idea: make the maps app collaborative. Prior, the features were minimal, and there was no possibility for interaction between others. Now, thanks to Mr. Hamann’s talent and efforts, you can collaborate with family, friends, or colleagues in Nextcloud Maps.

To do this, you first create a new map under the default. You can name it anything you like, for example, “Bike Tour in Europe.” Then you can create your route, and add stops along the way in the form of tags. These tags will show up as pictures on the map, seen below.

To add family and friends, just share it with them using the sidebar and they will not only be invited to see the map, but can make comments too. It’s a great space to discuss trip plans with the map visual as a very helpful tool.

In addition, you can also share your live location and allow others to add theirs. This is of course helpful during a trip, especially for a bike tour, when people are moving at different speeds or break off in groups. Want to meet up for lunch on the way to the next destination? Share your location and tag a new picture to the map so everyone can find it, and you.

There’s so many new possibilites with the new collaborative app, so we encourage you to try it out!

To see a wonderful demo of collaborative Maps, check out the video below:

Arne Hamann received the 1st prize at the NextGov Hackathon and was awarded €5,000 for his time, efforts, and talent in creating the new Maps features. We thank him for his work and dedication at the event, and in improving Nextcloud which in turn will hope to encourage public administrations to switch to more secure, open source cloud solutions.

Stay tuned for features of the rest of the winners on #AppTuesday this month!

Edit: Collaborative maps is based on a new maps frontend, therefore this needs to be released before the collaborative maps can be released. The release of the new frontend is scheduled for July 18th and the collaborative maps feature will come out with Nextcloud 25 or 25.0.1. release. Thank you for your patience!

The post Plan your next trip with Nextcloud Maps! New Features! appeared first on Nextcloud.

From April 25^th to May 10^th, Nextcloud and the European Commission’s DIGIT team joined forces in creating the NextGov Hackathon.

There were three main goals of our hackathon:

One, to add new features and improvements to Nextcloud Hub. We have a large team of developers working hard every day, however new ideas and talent from our community and beyond are much appreciated.

“As developers, it’s really nice to see other people working on Nextcloud who make new applications.”

Carl (Nextcloud) & mentor at the NextGov Hackathon

Two, with new, additional enhancements and features of Nextcloud, we hope to attract public administrations and government entities to use our cloud solution. The more Nextcloud improves and develops, the more it will be seen, shared, and used by these important administrations who also share the values of data privacy.

Three, to bring people together from around the world in the name of coding and software development. As what are hackathons for but to bring likeminded people together to achieve a common goal. In the end, it’s about you!

We are pleased to have met these goals and to achieve overall success.

Prize Winners!

Between 60 participants from 33 different countries were phenomenal ideas, inspiration, and talent, as well as a lot of effort yielded. As announced in our live streamed video, we have 5 lucky winners who won prizes from €500 to €5,000.

Prize #1:

Our first prize winner (€5.000) was for a contributor from Germany, who created an extension to the maps application with loads of exciting features.

The collaborative map allows you to create, organize, and share a map which is ideal for collaborating on trip preparations.

For example, you can tag locations on your map for places you want to stop at like viewpoints, restaurants, and landmarks. These show up as picture icons directly on the map which makes it easier to visualize your trip. Then, you can immediately share the map with your family and friends and they can even comment in the space.

“We expect there will be a lot of demand for this. This feature is very helpful for both private and organizational use, and the developer did great work implementing it.”

– Jos Poortvliet, Nextcloud Co-founder and Director of Marketing

Stay tuned next #AppTuesday for a very special feature about the first prize!

Prize #2:

The second prize winner (€3.500), comprised of a group from Malaysia, Spain, and Greece, worked on an extension to the contacts app that brings a cool, new organizational chart feature.

Directly in your Nextcloud contacts, you can create a visual organizational chart fast and simply which is ideal for companies and organizations of all sizes to keep track of your always changing organization.

“This is a wonderful idea that will make even our own HR-team super happy. I can see how this is useful in pretty much any organization deploying Nextcloud.”

– Jos Poortvliet, Nextcloud Co-founder and Director of Marketing

Prize #3, 4, & 5:

Third prize (€2.500) focused on a SSO (single sign-on system), while fourth (€1.500) and fifth (€500) prizes were awarded to projects focusing on the Trello to Deck integration.

Nextcloud and the European Commission are pleased with the results, and a huge thank you goes out to all the contributors whether an individual or a team, the moderators from Nextcloud, the organizers of the event, and those cheering on from afar. We couldn’t have achieved so much without you!

Hope to see you same time, next year!

Nextcloud and the European Commission have been working closely together for years, as they share our mission and values regarding data sovereignty, and making EU institutions, governments, and businesses be able to take back control of their data.

About the Directorate-General for Informatics (DIGIT)

The Directorate-General for Informatics is the Commission department responsible for providing digital services that support other Commission departments and EU institutions in their daily work and that help public administrations in EU member countries work better together. DIGIT’s mission is to deliver digital services to enable EU policies and to support the Commission’s internal administration. Follow DIGIT on Twitter @EU_DIGIT.

The post That’s a Wrap! The NextGov Hackathon was a success, learn about what got done! appeared first on Nextcloud.

Max and Jonas are the innovators behind Collectives, a collaborative knowledge database or “Wiki” that is a growing, yet trustworthy space to share meeting notes, documents, and important information.

Collectives is the perfect app for thriving activist and community projects to come alive!

With Collectives, you have an entire page dedicated to your project, with the opportunity to organize all your information on a main page and in corresponding documents.

“Come, organize and build shared knowledge!”

The story of how it began

It’s true that many successful business ideas originate out of a need for something that is lacking. The same goes for Collectives, where innovators Max and Jonas recognized that the existing open source options to self-organize a community project were outdated and not intuitive. With a more modern user experience, they thought, more people would be open to working with such an app. With that in mind, the journey began!

With help in the form of funds and support from the German Federal Ministry of Education & Research (BMBF’s) Prototype Fund, they were able to work on the project full-time. The Prototype Fund is interested in community projects that benefit the public in tech and fund those with potential. Max and Jonas were even able to re-apply for funding and receive it, due to their need for maintenance and improvements in a new area.

Their goal and main focus has always been the same – create collaboration asynchronously that targets social groups that want to build their knowledge base.

This project that started with the Prototype Fund is what led the team to work at Nextcloud and continue their work on Collectives full-time.

To get an even more in-depth story of Collective’s roots and how the Prototype Fund works, feel free to listen to our podcast!

Use cases

The very first use case was started by founder Max, who used Collectives with his roommates to organize cleaning tasks and other coordination for their shared apartment. It was a great way to keep track of who bought what, appliances needing maintenance, and more.

Today, Collectives can be used for a variety of causes, that help organizations, individuals, and businesses stay organized, share information, and collaborate.

In an organization

An activist group running Café United, an independent and solidarity café for refugees to seek counseling in asylum and residency near Frankfurt, also uses Collectives.

Their team was driven to use Collectives due to its free and open source nature, as well as its simplicity and ability to collect many documents in one shared space.

Since they have a lot of contact with lawyers, translators, and NGO’s due to the nature of their service, it becomes very easy with Collectives to share these contacts and important information in a shared knowledge space. They also use it to upload meeting minutes and to have a place to develop and work together on ideas.

Personal Initiative

For one family, they use Collectives as a directory for their vacation home. Inside they have pages and sub pages they use internally within the family for coordination and preparation, as well as for guests. When they invite guests to stay there, they can export and/or print out a pdf that they give to the guests so that they have all the information they need regarding the home’s appliances, safety measures, and other protocols.

Business

Within Nextcloud GmbH, we use Collectives internally for our official company handbook. It’s a great space for management and HR to share important information and collaborate with employees.

Overall, Collectives has the potential to make a mark in your organization, personal initiative, or business.

Coming soon to your Collective

Max and Jonas both share a passion to continue Collective’s progress and success.

With the new Nextcloud 24 release, for example, comes exciting new editable sharing and permission management. The admin of the Collective can now allow whoever he or she wants to edit documents. Also what’s new is the ability to create beautiful tables within Collective pages, and being able to set a default order to pages like “most recent.”

Other ideas in the making are “Collectives” to have the ability to add attachments to pages, an improved search bar, custom page order, and more! Stay tuned for when these updates come out!

The team of two also hopes to start doing coordinated user testing at a local university, amongst family and friends, and through a focus group. This way, they could see first-hand how others approach Collectives, learn how to use it, and navigate through the app. From a developer’s perspective, this kind of data provides clarity and can be extremely helpful in making new improvements and features. In fact, you can already contribute now to an important survey here!

What we love about Collectives

Here’s the top features in Collectives right now:

• A Collective is owned by a Nextcloud Circle – Circles are special groups with other users, colleagues, and friends that can be used with other apps for sharing purposes through an API.
• Collaborative page editing

• Popular Markdown language usage

Markdown is a well-know, easy to use favorite for simple page formatting. Whether you want to make simple headings, bolded sections, or bullet points, it’s easy for everyone to use.

Try it out yourself

Truly the best way to get to know this innovative collaborative knowledge database is to try it out yourself.

Simply go to the Nextcloud App Store and find the Collectives app!

On behalf of the Nextcloud Collective’s team, we wish you success in your Collective, making it work for your goals and initiatives.

The post All about Collectives: its founders, mission, and use cases. Create a Collective today! appeared first on Nextcloud.