ownCloud Client 1.6: The Tour

Now that ownCloud 1.6.0 beta1 is out, it’s time to explain the story behind it:

This release was developed under the promise that it would improve performance ¹⁾, and we have made tremendous improvements: Using a new Qt-based propagator implementation, we can now perform multiple simultaneous up- and downloads. We still provide the old propagator for certain situation where it’s more suitable, such as for situations where bandwidth limitation is needed.

Furthermore, the sync journal access code has been significantly optimized. It paid tribute to most of the high CPU load during the mandatory interval checks. CPU usage should be much lower now, and the client should be usable with more files at the same time.

Windows users should also find update times improved as the time spent in file stat operations has been reduced. Mac OS X users will enjoy the benefits of a much improved file watcher. To be able to use the more efficient API, 1.6 drops support for Mac OS Snow Leopard (10.6) and now requires Mac OS 10.7 or better.

At the same time, production releases are now using Qt 5 rather than Qt 4 on Windows and Mac OS X²⁾. This fixes a lot of visual bugs in Mac OS X, especially for Mavericks users, and allows us to profit from improvements in the SSL handling, especially on the Mac.

We also implemented an item that was on many peoples wish list: a concise sync log. Next to the database, the sync folder now holds a hidden file called .owncloudsync.log. It will store all sync processes in a minimal CSV file. Contrary to previous logging facilities, it always logs and only collects information relevant to the actual sync algorithm decisions.

Because this tour was not as colorful as the previous one, let’s close this blog post with a feature contributed by Denis Dzyubenko: The settings dialog on Mac OS X now has a native look & feel:

Get ownCloud Client 1.6.0 beta1 now and provide feedback!

¹⁾ Now that while the client is multi-threaded, you may find that the transfer time still doesn’t improve as much as you would expect. This is due locking issues on the server which prevent efficient parallel transfers. This has been improved in 1.7, and could potentilly improved even further by implementing support for X-Sendfile/X-Accel-Redirect in SabreDAV, the DAV framework used by ownCloud server.

²⁾ We can’t do the switch even on modern Linux distributions mostly due of the poor support for modern and divergent Systray/Notification area support in Qt5: Even in Qt 4 we could only use it because Canonical had patched their Qt to make QSystemTrayIcon work with Unity, which they have not ported to Qt 5 yet. Gnome 3 also hides away traditional Systray icons way to well, not to speak of Plasma. Any leads would be helpful.

PS: Martin’s blog on the subject indicates that Qt 5.3 might solve the problem.