There have been a number of exciting improvements since the last update, so without further ado, here they are:
Easier EteSync DAV setup: pre-built binaries
EteSync DAV is a CalDAV and CardDAV adapter for EteSync. What does that mean? It's an adapter layer you'd run on e.g. your desktop in order to use EteSync with DAV supporting applications such as Thunderbird, Outlook and macOS Contacts.
While installing EteSync DAV was easy on Arch Linux (package in AUR), easy if you have a working Python environment (just get it with pip) or easy if you used Docker (there's an image + instructions), it wasn't easy for most people to install; especially on Windows.
Thanks to PyInstaller, we now ship pre-built and self-contained binaries for EteSync DAV for Linux, Windows and macOS which transforms getting EteSync DAV into a simple file download.
For more information, please take a look at the new install instructions.
Many improvements to EteSync DAV
While on the topic of EteSync DAV, please update your EteSync DAV installations. There have been many improvements and bug fixes and it's always best to use the most up to date version!
Read-only journals
While sharing journals (e.g. calendars and address books) has been supported for a very long time, we have now added support for sharing journals as read-only. When sharing a journal with users, you can now choose which access level you would like to grant them.
This is an important part of journal sharing, and enables use cases such as having a semi-public school calendar or sharing an employee directory. Though where it really shows its strength is with public or semi-public DAV bridges, which brings us to our next point:
Experimental: hosted DAV adapter
This recently added experimental feature makes it possible to share collections (e.g. an address book or a calendar) with users that don't use EteSync or to platforms that are not yet supported by EteSync, such as iOS.
It's essentially a DAV translation layer hosted by us, that decrypts the EteSync data and serves it as a standard DAV collection which is therefore compatible with any DAV client.
To use it, enable it from the dashboard and follow the instructions. You can then use the Android client (hopefully soon the web too) to share specific journals with that account like you would with any other account.
This solution is great for people who use EteSync or would like to use EteSync but need to share their calendars with non-users, especially iOS non-users. It's also very useful if you'd like to share your calendar with many users without needing them to install EteSync.
Important: please note that any journal shared with the hosted DAV accounts is essentially not end-to-end encrypted, so for those journals it's effectively just a secure hosted DAV solution.
Improvements to the web client
There have been many improvements to the web client. We've implemented basic task viewing and editing (there's still work to be done), initial support for shared journals management and many UI improvements. It's better if you just take a look yourself. ;)
Version 1.0 of the Android client!
This is hardly news, as 1.0 was released a few months ago already, but it's still a milestone worth a mention.
Additionally, this version change doesn't mean much because the Android app has been stable for a while now, but with the recent features added (e.g. tasks and encryption password change), cleanups and stability improvements, we feel like it's time.
FOSDEM talk: video is up!
Tom recently gave a talk at FOSDEM about the challenges with building end-to-end encrypted applications based on his learnings from EteSync. The video recording is now online, and you can watch it from the talk's page.
If interested, you should also check out Tom's EteSync talk from last year.
Feedback, suggestions and contributions
As usual, I would like to take this opportunity to remind you that we would like to hear your thoughts. Do you have some suggestions? Noticed an issue? Please send patches, report issues, or contact us.
In addition, your contributions are always welcome! Be it testing, design, code, reporting issues or helping us spread the word! Every bit helps in making EteSync better for everyone. If you are interested in contributing and don't know where to start, please, just contact us!
Until next time…