As stated many many times I stopped maintaining „my“ ownCloud apps, those four little helpers you can add to your ownCloud installation to extend it with additional features. Back then designing, implementing and maintaining them was fun and allowed me to learn quite a lot about that type of web technology. The decision to stop contributing to the ownCloud project was a hard one, but it also was a correct one. Besides the fact that I simply could not invest that amount of time into this contribution is only one side of the reasons behind the decision. The bigger problem was lack of support I received and the insight that the core team and the company backing the project showed no motivation to address long known issues with their app store and support of 3rd party apps which made maintaining those apps a pain.
Anyway, still I am convinced that ownCloud is a great thing, I use it myself and can only recommend it. Certainly there are the obvious alternatives for some of its features, like dropbox for file exchange, google for stuff like calendar and document collaboration. But ownCloud is unique in bundling those features to a single place, something like a „personal information center“, as I recognize it. And there is the political and ethical aspect, unlike those cloud services ownCloud allows you to stay in control over your personal data. Especially after the horrifying insights the whistleblower Edvard Snowden gave, even the last person using the internet should have realized what many suggested or believed before: that secret services, „security“ agencies and commercial companies sniff through all your private data stored on those public cloud services. Existing laws are ignored, your options about privacy are a joke. And there seems to be absolutely no insight on their side about the horrifying outreaches these actions will have. Everyone is affected by this, we have to deal with this challenge. And ownCloud is one of many aspects where you actually can step up and do something yourself, something that does make a difference. Do it!
But back to the title of this post:
Today I found a nice podcast about ownCloud, actually only a single part in a series someone published:
YouTube: OwnCloud Part 6: Plug Ins
Now what is special about this one is, that it actually covers two of my old apps as examples for the extensibility of ownCloud, „Shorty“ and the small „FluXX Compensator (Y)„! Scroll forward to 7:20min / 11:50min if you are impatient. Sure, those apps are not maintained any more, actually they are not even available in current ownCloud versions. Nevertheless it was a nice and nostalgic feeling to see someone else present them in this form. Actually there are some faults in the explanations given. As often seen the author apparently has taken only a superficial insight into ownCloud and those apps, thus he miss interpreted some of the features and options. But what the heck. It was fun to see that simple tutorial, something I myself never came around creating.
It sad that the 2 app you developed for OC5 won’t make it to 7 :(. I understand your frustrations and just want to say thanks for your work!!! Now I need to wean my way off of shorty, like a addict :). I actually used it more like a bookmarking app than sharing short urls.
I can only hope that someone else pick it up or you find the fun in it again one day.
Cheers!!
x