ownCloud is a free software alternative to some proprietary web services that includes music streaming, file management which supports sharing, calendar, contacts and more:
ownCloud offers the ease-of-use of Dropbox and box.net with a more secure, transparently managed offering. As an open source project ownCloud 3 offers innovative features, a flexible architecture and no vendor lock in.
ownCloud 3 has been released recently with some cool new features, such as:
- Built-in cloud text editor that supports 35 programming languages for syntax highlighting, keyboard shortcuts support, automatic indent and outdent, unstructured / user code folding and live syntax checker (for JavaScript, Coffee and CSS). Editing more advanced file types like .doc and .odt is planned for a future release:
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| ownCloud text editor |
- Integrated PDF viewer:
- Photo gallery application with automatic album generation and dynamic covers:
Other changes in ownCloud 3:
- Application Store: support for installing third party applications and addons through a central repository, directly from the ownCloud interface
- new calendar interface
- various calendar and contacts improvements
- A new "external" application that lets you integrate external applications (like an external webmail interface for instance) into the ownCloud interface
The complete list of new features and improvements can be found HERE.
Unfortunately, this release doesn't bring encryption, a desktop sync client or versioning/recovery yet, features which many consider extremely important, but fortunately, all of these features are top priority so hopefully we'll see all of them in a future ownCloud release.
Download / try ownCloud
If you want to try out ownCloud without installing it, head over to http://demo.owncloud.org
ownCloud is available in the official Ubuntu repositories, but that's a very old version (pre version 2) so to install the latest ownCloud in Ubuntu, see our initial post about ownCloud: ownCloud: Your Personal Cloud Server.
Arch Linux users can install ownCloud via AUR, however, at the time I'm writing this post, the package hasn't been updated with the latest ownCloud 3.
Download ownCloud | Update: the ownCloud website seems to be down for now, so here's an alternate download link (via ownCloud @ Twitter).
