If you are in Spain during June, you will have some opportunities to discover eyeOS and the eyeOS Team point of view concerning Web Operating Systems and Open Source software in the following (free) events/conferences:

-Suscipe Enterpeneurs Forum (in Madrid), on June 4th, to present the project, its history and future. You can confirm the assistance in this page.

-The Coffee Break 2008 (in Cáceres) on June 13th and 14th.

And possibly, another one on June 26th in Ourense (still to be confirmed). We’ll soon confirm this last one and publish some other events during July, in Spain.

If you are interested in the eyeOS Team to give a conference in your University/Forum/Company, please contact at team @ eyeos.org.

One month after the eyeOS 1.6 release, we are happy to announce the immediate availability of the first maintenance release to the 1.6 branch: eyeOS 1.6.0.1.

This particular release doesn’t contain any security fix, but it’s recommended to all eyeOS system administrators to update, since it contains important bugfixes and small new features, such as the Internet Explorer 6 support, the import and export (with OPML format) in eyeFeeds or the new session language selection in the Login Screen.

You can download the new release from the downloads page and view the full changelog in the Developer’s center.

On the other hand, the eyeOS Project reached yesterday 300.000 downloads from the SourceForge servers. This is a good moment to say thanks to SourceForge for the great service they provide to eyeOS and more than 170.000 other projects.

We are proud to announce the availability of eyeSync, the eyeOS Synchronization Tool, for Microsoft Windows 98, Me, 2000, XP and Vista.

It’s a portable application, and all you need to do to get it running is to uncompress it somewhere in your system (or even inside a Pendrive) and launch eyeSync. The first time you launch it, it will ask you to configure your account (from Preferences). If you want to use it with the Public Server, just put www.eyeos.info in the Server field, and your username/password in the other fields.

You can download it from here and from the Downloads page.

You can add folders form your system to keep synchronized with your eyeOS by pressing Add Folder and choosing the local folder you want to keep synchronized with your eyeOS, and the eyeOS folder you want the contents to go to. Please note that the eyeOS folder must exist, and it must be empty.

When you add a folder, its content will start to synchronize and you can open your eyeOS session and check that your local contents are being imported. Note that the system will detect every change you do on the synchronized folders (such as file edits).

It’s an early version and feedback will be appreciated on the eyeOS Forums.

To see eyeOS widely used by scientists all around the world, a group of eyeOS users and developers, leaded by Alexandre Mejat, has initiated the eyeLIMS project. eyeLIMS is a community-driven project which aims at providing a Free Open Source Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS) powered by eyeOS.

The eyeLIMS community will develop new eyeOS applications or port to eyeOS existing free open source applications specifically dedicated to molecular and cellular biology.

The eyeLIMS Software Suite will include a set of eyeOS applications dedicated to common activities in research laboratories such as managing samples or reagents (eyeStorage), managing bibliographic references (eyeBiblio) or manipulating data (eyeJmol).

The whole project is Free and Open Source and will be released under GNU Affero GPL v.3 license (the same as eyeOS). If you would like to collaborate with the project or you are interested in following its development, you can check the project’s homepage and its discussion board.

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!