The eyeOS Team and eyeOS Community are proud to announce the immediate availability of eyeOS 1.6 Gala Sync. This new major release, which has been centered entirely to improve the user experience at eyeOS, includes new applications, significant improvements on the overall usability and new tools to develop better applications, faster.

The new eyeOS 1.6 Desktop includes major improvements such as Drag and Drop between folders and groups, new widgets that can be launched from Accessories menu and a common actions bar, with some overall improvements on its design and functionality.

The new Gala Sync version also includes new applications such as the new eyeFeeds to read RSS sources, the new Text Editor with syntax highlighting for the most common programming languages and autocomplete features, an integrated IDE (only launchable from root user) called eyeCode and some new Games and Tools such as eyeTetravex (a math game with a system highscores system) or the new Calculator.

The system part from eyeOS 1.6 has been also improved: Developers have new base libraries to make apps that communicate beween them and create virtual work groups, lots of small fixes on the eyeOS Toolkit Widgets and the new XML-RPC system , which is the base for the syncronization, and allows the creation of desktop applications which communicate with eyeOS.

Synchronization with your local computer

Probably the most important feature of this release is the ability to create desktop apps that communicate eyeOS with the local computer where the user is in every moment, and the release of eyeSync (the first app to use this technology in eyeOS).

The syncronization tool for eyeOS, called eyeSync, will be an official app but will have its own versioning. The 0.1 version of eyeSync, which allows to syncronize automatically and transparently different folders from the system will be available today for Mac OS X (Tiger/PPC and Leopard/Intel) and Linux (in deb and source/targz), and during the next week for Windows XP and Vista.

eyeSync will keep the folders you indicate always synchronized with your eyeOS account without requiring any action from you: eyeSync will detect every change you do on those folders (copying/removing some files, saving or updating some documents…) and synchronize them with your eyeOS desktop, transparently and automatically.

You can download eyeSync and the new eyeOS version from the eyeOS Downloads page.

The first time you run eyeSync you will have to configure it by putting your server’s URL ( that can be the public server one, http://www.eyeos.info or your own local or remote eyeOS Server) and your username and password. Nothing special must be installed in the server, and all the data is transfered via the port 80, so you won’t encounter problems with local proxies when using it.

Trying the new eyeOS version

As usually, if you want to use the new eyeOS 1.6 version you can do it from the Public Server, which has been already updated to eyeOS 1.6, or downloading and installing to your local server. eyeOS is Open Source Software, released under the Affero GNU Public License (AGPL) version 3.

One more… Thanks!

The development of this version has been done from its first days together with the eyeOS Community. From posts on the Forums regarding the new features that eyeOS 1.6 should had, the continoued contributions and suggestions to the Development Mailing lists, and a really intensive bug reporting during all the beta period.

This has been possible thanks to the more than 1.000 registered users in the Beta server, that will be closed later today.

Thanks!

What’s next?

It’s a bit early to say, but we can announce that the next eyeOS version won’t start by “1″, and will introduce a new eyeOS Toolkit, but always mantaining compatibility with eyeOS Toolkit 1.

We’ll be doing the announcement of the new version Roadmap and plans very soon, after the publication of the stable versions of eyeSync for Windows, Mac and Linux.

Stay tuned!

Anaël Ollier (nanawel), a very active eyeOS Community Developer who has already added code to the main development branch (with eyeFTP, soon with eyeTetravex and lots of system fixes) has joined us in the eyeOS main Office at Barcelona, Spain, for the next five months.

Welcome Anaël!

“La Factoria d’Imatge” (the image factory, in catalan) is a leading visual communication company that will be improving the global project image for eyeOS, introducing new videos to show and communicate its concept in a better way.

During the next weeks, and specially after the eyeOS 1.6 release, you will be discovering a new way to present the eyeOS concept and idea, thanks to La Factoria!

eyeOS has been selected as one of the Finalists for the CNET’s Webware 2008, under the Browsing category. It’s such a honor for us to be competing with Microsoft, Google and some other big companies. You can vote for eyeOS at the following link:

The voting process does end on monday’s noon, so be fast on voting!

One more time, thanks for being such a great community.

During the last weeks we have been releasing some key parts around eyeOS that can be specially interesting for developers. Today we are releasing something bigger, which will be from now, the new central place for all the eyeOS Developers around the world: The eyeOS Developers Community.

The new Developers Community, accessible through dev.eyeos.org, does provide lots of new places and services for eyeOS developers to find help on their developments and share the progress with other developers:

• Blueprints site, based on Launchpad, to register and work on projects and ideas around eyeOS.
• Bug tracking system, also based on Launchpad.
• Developers wiki with manuals, informations, how-to’s…
• The new Mailing  Lists
• Documentation centre  and  development manual
• And much, much more!

You can contribute to the new community by moving your projects, ideas, known bugs and development pages to the new sites, specially those which are now in the general wiki. We will progressively transform the eyeOS Wiki to a users wiki to find manuals and how-to’s of the system usage. All Development content should be moved to the new Developers Wiki.

You can also subscribe to the new mailing lists, to stay tuned on the new releases, bugs discussions, patches around the system…

This new site (and blog post) does end, for now, the serie of news of eyeOS for developers. There will be a last surprise sometime during March/April, and we’re sure will be greatly accepted by all the eyeOS developers… and probably PHP ones ;-).

To all those users who want to read news around the eyeOS project itself, we will be releasing very soon the roadmaps around the next big versions in eyeOS. You can be sure they will be very hot for everyone!