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With the start of the new year, I am very happy to announce the release of version Kraft 2.0.0 . Kraft provides effective invoicing and document management for small businesses on Linux. Check the feature list . This new version is a big step ahead for the project. It does not only deliver the outstanding ports to Qt6 and KDE Frameworks 6 and tons of modernizations and cleanups, but for the first…
Kraft ( Github ) is the desktop app making it easy to create offers and invoices quickly and beautifully in small companies. It is targetted to the free desktop and runs on Linux. This is the release announcement of the new Kraft version 1.2.2 . This is a small service release that fixes a few bugs and CI issues. Right after this release, the branch with significant changes for Kraft 2.0 will be…
A Viewer for e-invoice documents in the XRechnung format
Test Infinite Scale on x86-Linux, Raspberry and Mac in no time.
A few days ago Volker Krause posted this blog about the Nextcloud conference - a very interesting read. One of the topics is the VFS (Virtual Filesystem-) API for the Linux desktop. Indeed that is a topic for us at ownCloud as well, and I like to share our perspective on it, discussing it in the scope of the free desktop. The topic is very important, as “syncing” of data from and to cloud storages…
Kraft ( Github ) is a desktop utility making it easy to create offers and invoices quickly and beautifully in small companies. Today we are releasing Kraft Version 1.1 with significant improvements for users and the Krafts integration with latest software such as cmake and KDE. It received updated dutch translations in UI and also for the manual. The application icon was fixed, and some cmake…
The XRechnung format is a E-Government standard for electronic invoicing. At some point it will be mandatory for every company dealing with German governmental partners to send the invoices in this XML format. Many commercial vendors have already caught up and provide ways to generate XRechnung formatted documents with their software. However, to my knowledge, the availability of open source end…
Kraft , which was released as version 1.0 after long time of active development, is targetted to the Linux desktop. My firm conviction is that the Linux desktop is very suitable for the target group of Kraft: In the small office of craftsmen for example, a Linux desktop is a great work horse which is stable, very well adoptable and has a great amount of applications that are stable and maintained.…
It is a pleasure to announce that Kraft Version 1.0 was released last week. What is Kraft? Kraft is free software to create office documents like offers and invoices in an efficient way. It runs on the Linux desktop and suits small businesses of all kinds. After countless releases with version numbers 0.x, Kraft finally goes with version number 1.0 with this release. It is in production at several…
Welcome to my new blog. This is the successor of my previous blog on https://dragotin.wordpress.com . After paying wordpress quite some money to get an advertise free blog I decided to get rid of that and have my own hosted blog where I do not have to pay for not having battle ships or girls underneath my articles. Yes, that is true: Readers sent me screenshots with this kind of images. So I am…
We are happy to announce the new Kraft version 0.98 that is available for download . Kraft is software for the Linux desktop to handle quotes and invoices in the small business. This is a version packed with bugfixes and also new features. The most important fixes were in the area of the catalog handling: Based on bug reports from the community the catalog window was completely reworked. Drag and…
The good thing about this quiet holidays is that there is time to work on projects. I had a few nice changes of PDF Quirk laying around, and now finalized them to a new version. Please welcome PDF Quirk version 0.95! What is PDF Quirk? PDF Quirk is a little desktop utility to create PDF files from images, targeted to non nerdy desktop users. Sending PDFs is (still) often a requirement in offices…
it could already be read somewhere that 2021 will be the year of Linux on the desktop :-D Fine with me. Just to support that, I did a little hackery over XMas to improve the support for ownClouds virtual file system on the Linux Desktop. What are Virtual Files? In professional usecases, users often have a huge amount of data stored in ownCloud . Syncing these completely to the desktop computer or…
In the day job we use Microsoft Teams. The good news is that it is running on the Linux Desktop , and specifically KDE . So far, so good, however, there was a problem with screensharing for me. Whenever I tried to share my KDE screen, the screen became black, surrounded with a red rectangle as indicator for the shared area. The people who I shared with also just saw the black area, and also the…
The authors are happy to announce the new release 0.95 of Kraft. Kraft is free desktop software for managing office documents like quotes and invoices in the small enterprise for the Linux desktop. Kraft Version 0.95 With version 0.95 we do a big step forward in the way of generating documents: Until now (more than fifteen years!) Kraft uses the ReportLab python library to create high quality PDF…
recently I learned about the Open Search Foundation in the public broadcast radio ( Bayern 2 Radio Article ). That surprised me: I had not heard about OSF before, even though I am active in the field of free software and culture. But this new foundation made it into the mainstream broadcast already. Reason enough to take a closer look. It is a very good sign to have the topic of internet search in…
How often have you scanned a letter, a certificate or whatever and looked for the right way to call $UTILITY to convert it to a PDF that can be shared via internet? For this very common use case I could not find a tool to make that really easy for the Linux desktop. Given my mission to help making the Linux desktop more common in the small business world (do you know Kraft ?) I spent some time…
This blog is to inform that Kraft , the Qt and KDE based desktop software to manage documents like invoices and quotes in your small company was released in version 0.90 recently. Followup Documents A great new feature is the completely reworked handling of so called follow-up documents. Kraft has this feature to help dealing with docs that follow on a certain kind of predecessor doc in the…
It is a great idea to encrypt files on client side before uploading them to an ownCloud server if that one is not running in controlled environment, or if one just wants to act defensive and minimize risk. Some people think it is a great idea to include the functionality in the sync client. I don’t agree because it combines two very complex topics into one code base and makes the code…
Usually, in my workshop I am listening to the great radio station Bayern 2 (Yeah for public law media). But sometimes you just need to listen to nice classic english punk music, speed folk or (the one and only) Lemmy and friends. For that I was looking for a so called boom box to stream to from my mobile, simple, dirty and loud. Good that I was a proud awardee at the HiFiBerry Maker Contest 2017…
Recently the German computer magazin C’t posted an article about file sync solutions ( “Unter eigener Regie” , C’t 23, 2018) with native sync clients. The article was pretty positive about the FOSS solution of… Nextcloud ! I was wondering why they had not choosen ownCloud’s client as my feeling is that ownCloud is way more busy and innovative developing the…
This November was very exciting for me so far, as I was starting a new job at a company called Heidolph . I left SUSE after working there for another two years. My role there that was pretty far away from interesting technical work, which I missed more and more, so I decided to grab the opportunity to join in a new adventure. Heidolph is a mature German engineering company building premium…
A new release of Kraft , the Qt- and KDE based software to help to organize business docs in small companies, has arrived. A couple of days ago version 0.82 was released. It mainly is a bugfix release, but it also comes with a few new features. Users were asking for some new functions that they needed to switch to Kraft with their business communication, and I am always trying to make that a…
I am happy to announce the release of Kraft version 0.81 . Kraft is a Qt based desktop application that helps you to handle documents like quotes and invoices in your small business. Version 0.81 is a bugfix release for the previous version 0.80, which was the first stable release based on Qt5 and KDE Frameworks5. Even though it came with way more new features than just the port, it’s first…
I am happy to announce the release of the stable Kraft version 0.80 ( Changelog ). Kraft is desktop software to manage documents like quotes and invoices in the small business. It focuses on ease of use through an intuitive GUI, a well choosen feature set and ensures privacy by keeping data local. After more than a dozen years of life time, Kraft is now reaching a new level: It is now completely…
Following my last blog about Kraft s upcoming release 0.80 I got a lot of positive reactions. There was one reaction however, that puzzles me a bit and I want to share my thoughts here. It is about a comment about my announcement that I prefer to continue to develop Kraft on Github . The commenter reminded my friendly that there is still Kraft code on KDE infrastructure, and that switching to a…
Kraft is KDE/Qt based desktop software to manage documents like quotes and invoices in the small business. It focuses on ease of use through an intuitive GUI, a well chosen feature set and ensures privacy by keeping data local. Kraft is around for more than twelve years, but it has been a little quiet recently. However, Kraft is alive and kicking! I am very happy to announce the first public beta…
Following up on my first DIY Net Player Post on this blog, I like to present another player that I recently built. [caption id=“teakear1” align=“alignnone” width=“800”] TeakEar media player[/caption] This is a Raspberry Pi based audiophile net player that decodes my mp3 collection and net radio to my Linn amplifier. It is called TeakEar , because it’s main…
The annual openSUSE Conference 2017 is upcoming! Next weekend it will be again in the Z-Bau in Nuremberg, Germany. The conference program is impressive and if you can make it, you should consider stopping by. Stefan Schäfer from the Invis server project and me will organize a workshop about openSUSE for Small and Medium Business (SMB) . SMB is a long running concern of the heart of the two of us:…
Here is something that might be a little outdated already, but I hope it still adds some interesting thoughts. The rainy Sunday afternoon today finally gives the opportunity to write this little blog. Recently an ownCloud fork was coming up with a little shiny box with one harddisk, that can be complemented with a Rapsberry Pi and their software, promoting that as your private cloud . While I like…
Even though we just had the nice and successful ownCloud Contributor Conference there have quite some ownCloud releases happened recently. I like to draw your attention to this for a moment, because some people seem to fail to see how active the ownCloud community actually is at the moment. There has been the big enterprise release 9.1 on September 20th, but that of course came along with…
ownCloud is even more hiring. In my last post I wrote that we need PHP developers, a security engineer and a system administrator. For all positions we got interesting inquiries already. That’s great, but should not hinder you from sending your CV in case you are still interested. We have multiple positions! But there is even more opportunity: Additionally we are looking for an ownCloud…
[caption id=“attachment_10199” align=“alignright” width=“300”] Come join us![/caption]After the recent news , we are now back on stage and with this blog we want to point you to our open positions. Yes, we are hiring people to work on ownCloud . ownCloud is an open source project, yes, but ownCloud GmbH , the company behind the project, provides significant…
A couple of weeks ago we released another significant milestone of the ownCloud Client, called version 2.2.0, followed by two small maintenance releases. ( download ). I’d like to highlight some of the new features and the changes that we have made to improve the user experience: Overlay Icons Overlay icons for the various file managers on our three platforms already exist for quite some…
Last night I found time to finally install the first release candidate of Volumio 2 , my preferred audio player software. This is more exciting than it sounds, because when I read the blogpost last summer that Volumio is going to be completely rewritten, with replacing the base technologies, I was a bit afraid that this will be one of the last bits that we heard from this project. Too many cool…
This is the third and final part of a little blog series about a new chunking algorithm that we discussed in ownCloud . You might be interested to read the first two parts ownCloud Chunking NG and Announcing an Upload as well. This part makes a couple of ideas how the new chunking could be useful with a future feature of incremental sync (also called delta sync ) in ownCloud. In preparartion of…
Something I wanted to share is a device I recently built. It is a complete net player for music files, served by a NAS. It’s now finished and “in production” now, so here is my report. [caption id=“attachment_616” align=“alignleft” width=“595”] The cherry ear net player, based on raspberry pi and HifiBerry Amp+.[/caption] Hardware The device is…
The first part of this little blog series explained the basic operations of chunk file upload as we set it up for discussion. This part goes a bit beyond and talks about an addition to that, called announcing the upload . With the processing described in the first part of the blog, the upload is done savely and with a clean approach, but it also has some drawbacks. Most notably the server does not…
Recently Thomas and me met in person and thought about an alternative approach to bring our big file chunking to the next level. “Big file chunking” is ownClouds algorithm to upload huge files to ownCloud with clients. This is the first of three little blog posts in which we want to present the idea and get your feedback. This is for open discussion, nothing is set in stone so far.
Today, we’re happy to release the best ownCloud Desktop Client ever to our community and users! It is ownCloud Client 1.8.0 and it will push syncing with ownCloud to a new level of performance, stability and convenience. [caption id=“attachment_586” align=“alignleft” width=“300”] The Share Dialog[/caption]This release brings a new integration into the…
Often questions come up about the meaning of FileIDs and ETags. Both values are metadata that the ownCloud Server stores for each of the files and directories in the server database. These values are fundamentally important for the integrity of data in the overall system. Here are some thoughts about what they are why these are so important.This is mainly from a clients point of view, but there…
[caption id=“attachment_548” align=“alignright” width=“240”] Nautilus Shell, David Bygott [/caption] Incremental Sync is probably the feature that most people ask, or even sometimes cry for. Recently there was another wave of discussion about ownCloud is doing incremental sync or not. I will try again (as in this issue ) to explain why we decided to slowing that…
Our recent ownCloud Client 1.7.0 release contains the new feature of overlay icons in GNOME nautilus, MacOSX and Windows. That is nice, but that makes us as old KDE guys sad as Dolphin was missing on the list. [caption id=“attachment_536” align=“alignnone” width=“554”] KDE’s Dolphin with overlay icons for ownCloud’s file sync[/caption] That needs to…
Last week, Thomas, Christian and myself were attending a workshop in CERN , the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Geneve, Switzerland. CERN is a very inspiring place, attracting intelligent people from all over the world to get behind the secrets of our being. I felt honored to be at the place where for example the world wide web was invented. The event was called Workshop on Cloud…
Yesterday we released ownCloud Client 1.7.0. It is available via ownCloud’s website . This client release marks the next big step in open source file synchronization technology and I am very happy that it is out now. The new release brings two lighthouse features which I’ll briefly describe here. Overlay icons For the first time, this release has a feature that lives kind of outside…
Because it is still reported that the ownCloud Client has an increasing memory footprint when running for long time I am trying to monitor the QObject tree of the client. Valgrind does not report any memory problems with it so my suspicion was that somewhere QObjects are created with valid parent pointers referencing a long living object. These objects might accumulate unexpectedly over time and…
Yesterday, we released ownCloud 7 . You might have read that somewhere on the internet - it was widely announced and broadly picked up. If you do not have ownCloud yet, you really should try it now, and if you are one of the people happily using ownCloud for a while, update soon! In my opinion, ownCloud 7 is a real step ahead. So much work went into it from the brave server guys, and the result is…
End of last week, we have released version 1.6.1 of the ownCloud Client, the desktop tool that does file syncing with your ownCloud . Read on the Desktop Client page how to get and install it. The recommendation is to update your installation to this version. The previous version 1.6.0 had great new features, first and foremost the parallel up- and download of files and a way more performant…
Herewith I announce the availability of the new Kraft release 0.55 . It was finished today and fixes two issues that came up after the release of the previous version: A compile fix for compiling Kraft against the latest version of ctemplate , which did not work out of the box with Kraft 0.54. The other fix is a fail in generating PDF documents which is a pretty severe problem for Kraft. Both is…
I am happy to tell about the new release 0.54 of Kraft which was released a couple of days ago. It is not only a maintenance release but also comes with a couple of new features, the most outstandig is the ability to handle a new document type, the delivery note which prints no prices. That closes a gap for interesting use cases. Here is a more detailed log of what was added to this release.