We are very excited to announce the official release of EteSync 2.0!

This would not have been possible without the hundreds of testers that helped us make sure everything is solid! So thank you all!

If you already know what EteSync 2.0 is and just want to upgrade your account, please refer the EteSync 2.0 migration guide.

As we said in the post announcing EteSync 2.0, time flies. We still can't believe it has already been three and a half years since EteSync was first released. It started out as a simple end-to-end encrypted sync solution for Android. We have since added support for sharing data with other users, and we now have clients for the desktop (DAV bridge), the web, and iOS, built-in support in and Tasks.org, and there are add-ons being built for GNOME, KDE and Thunderbird.

What is EteSync 2.0?

EteSync uses the EteSync protocol (now Etebase protocol) behind the scenes to power all of the apps. While the existing protocol has served us well, it limited our progress and prevented us from achieving some of the things we would like to achieve for EteSync, so after three and a half years, it's finally time for a major protocol upgrade.

EteSync 2.0 is a great improvement over the 1.0 version, while still maintainig everyone's favourite features and capabilities, including, end-to-end encryption, sharing and a full version history. However, since so much has changed under the hood, EteSync 2.0 and 1.0 are incompatible, and you need to migrate your account to 2.0 in order to start using it.

What does it mean for you?

It means we are finally be able to offer some long awaited and often requested features such as notes synchronization and secure location sharing. It means that your sync is faster. It means the EteSync applications are simpler to develop, which means they are easier to improve. We are already seeing these benefits in all of the apps, which already work much better, and helped us reduce large amounts of code.

In addition, there are a lot of user-facing improvements and changes, including:

1. EteSync 2.0 uses usernames for identification (rather than emails previously), so you will need to choose a new username. Usernames should be at least 6 characters long. Shorter usernames will probably be allowed in the future. Changing your email and username will both be possible later on.
2. EteSync 2.0 has just one password that's used for both the encryption, and the login. It uses a zero-knowledge proof to authenticate to the server making sure your password never leaves your device. This makes it more secure than before but much easier to use. Please make sure to keep it safe and don't lose it, as without it you won't be able to access your data!
3. The change log (previously change journal) used to show all of the changes in one long list. Changes are now grouped per item with only the latest changed shown. To show previous changes you need to click on an item and check the past revisions.
4. Invitations UI is a bit different, and there's now a special page for accepting or rejecting invitations, and it's now also easier to leave collections you've been invited to.
5. "Journal" has now been renamed to "Collection", which is a more accurate term and people find it less confusing.
6. You can now easily change your account's email address directly from the dashboard.

What's next

The above is just the tip of the iceberg. The biggest benefit of changing to EteSync 2.0 is not how it improves things, but rather what it enables us to do next!

Thanks to EteSync 2.0 we were already able to release EteSync Notes. Additionally, as we said in the previous post, we aren't ready to get into details just yet, but we plan on bringing in some long-awaited features such as secure location sharing. Expect a few more announcements in the coming month or two which will make EteSync a more complete solution for your data syncing needs!

We also plan on formally verifying the protocol using Verifpal and releasing a formal spec to make it easier for other developers to examine, use and improve it, and potentially making it into a standard.

Upgrade to EteSync 2.0

Upgrading to EteSync 2.0 is very easy. First thing to do is to make sure you've update all of your apps to their latest versions.

As we said above, EteSync 2.0 accounts are incompatible with EteSync 1.0 accounts, so a new account needs to be created. However, the billing for both is linked. The migration tool automatically takes care of linking the billing, so you don't need to worry about that.

For step-by-step instructions please refer to the EteSync 2.0 migration guide.

Developers: easily build end-to-end encrypted applications

Over the years many developers have reached out to us about adding end-to-end encryption to their applications. Building end-to-end encrypted applications is both hard to get right, and very time consuming, so using an existing solution makes a lot of sense, especially since EteSync is versatile and isn't limited to contacts, calendars, tasks and notes.

We are now also ready for developers. For more information, please take a look at the developer homepage (Etebase).

Thank you NLnet and NGI0

The work on EteSync 2.0 is made possible with financial support from NLnet Foundation, courtesy of NGI0 Discovery and the European Commission DG CNECT's Next Generation Internet programme.

The NLnet foundation in general and the NGI0-PET in particular is funding projects to protect everyone's digital privacy, especially in the context of the "next generation" of the internet. It's an extremely important cause which we at EteSync are very much aligned with. Please help by spreading the word about them.

As usual, we would like to remind you that we rely on your feedback and contributions to make EteSync better. Do you have any suggestions or  are experiencing any issues? Please send patches, report issues or just contact us.

Come chat with us on IRC/Matrix, or follow us on Mastodon, Twitter, Facebook, reddit or RSS for the latest updates and privacy-related content!

When you first login into your account, the different EteSync apps automatically create a few default collections for you to use. One for calendar, one for contacts and one for tasks.

Until very recently, the default name for each of these collections was "Default". Many users found it confusing over the years, though we never got around to fixing it. This has finally changed thanks to a user that reminded us of how confusing it is. We rely on your feedback to make the service better, so please, keep it coming!

The name names for the collections are now as follows: "My Calendar", "My Contacts", and "My Tasks". This is how it looked before vs now:

Do you have anything else you think we should improve? Or do you think the naming is not great? Please let us know!

As usual, we would like to remind you that we rely on your feedback and contributions to make EteSync better. Do you have any suggestions or  are experiencing any issues? Please send patches, report issues or just contact us.

Come chat with us on IRC/Matrix, or follow us on Mastodon, Twitter, Facebook, reddit or RSS for the latest updates and privacy-related content!

We have been working hard on a few projects we can't wait to release and share with you. Though until then, here are a few recent updates regarding the web client:

Dark Mode!

Dark mode has gained a lot of popularity in the last few years, and accordingly, a lot of you have been asking for it. We first introduced it to the web client more than a month ago, so if you happened to browse the settings page you might have noticed it.

Here is how it looks:

To enable it, just open the web client, go to Settings and enable dark mode. It's still not perfect so if you notice any issues, please report them at the issue tracker.

Support for tagging tasks

You can now add arbitrary tags to tasks in order to classify them to your liking. There's also autocomplete for a pre-configured list of tags, though we will soon improve it to autocomplete to any of your existing ones.

Significant performance improvements for lists

Some users were reporting slow rendering of address books and journal entries for very long journals. This was happening because we were rendering the long lists all at once instead of loading them gradually. This has now been fixed, and the lists load as needed.

As usual, we would like to remind you that we rely on your feedback and contributions to make EteSync better. Do you have any suggestions or  are experiencing any issues? Please send patches, report issues or just contact us.

Come chat with us on IRC/Matrix, or follow us on Mastodon, Twitter, Facebook, reddit or RSS for the latest updates and privacy-related content!

Over the last few weeks Andrew Maney completely overhauled the task management view of the web client. Thanks to his great work, it went all the way from usable to awesome! This, together with the recent addition of EteSync support to Tasks.org, and the already great support in the desktop DAV bridge, make for a top-notch task management experience in EteSync.

Complete UI Makeover

The previous version of the tasks tab was, to say the least, lacking. It was ugly, not very usable, and was missing a lot of information that one would expect to be shown in a task application. The UI has been completely redone and now, it both looks and feels great!

Here is a screenshot of how it was before the change:

Compare the above to how it looks nowadays:

Handle your tasks faster

While it's gratifying to tick a task off the list once you are done, maintaining a task list is not a goal in itself. This is why the tasks view now lets you quickly add a task, directly from the main page, in addition to marking tasks as completed.

In addition, clicking on a task list used to take you to a pretty useless "task view" page, and only from there you could click again to edit it. This is no longer the case, now it takes you directly to the task edit page.

Task recurrence

Wether it's a weekly meeting, an annual check up, or just watering the plants, we all have tasks that recur on a regular basis. Task recurrence comes with its own set of unique challenges. For example, what should we do with a recurring task once it's marked as done? Nothing (like calendar events)? Do we update the due date according to the recurrence rule? Do we mark it as done, and copy it into a new recurring task?

Each of the above comes with its own set of challenges and trade-offs, though after some consideration we settled on the last option, which is also what Microsoft Exchange, GNOME (Evolution) and probably others do.

Search, filter and sort

You can now search, filter and sort your tasks. If you are anything like me, you have more than a few tasks in your queue, and being able to sort, filter and search them, is a massive time saver!

More to come

In addition to the above, Andrew fixed a lot of smaller quirks and made the web client into a tasks client to be proud of. So again, kudos to him!

With that being said, the work is not yet over, and you should expect more improvements in the coming weeks! Please let us know if you think there's anything missing or if you have any ideas on how to make things even better!

As usual, we would like to remind you that we rely on your feedback and contributions to make EteSync better. Do you have any suggestions or are experiencing any issues? Please send patches, report issues or just contact us.

Follow us on Mastodon, Twitter, Facebook, reddit or RSS for the latest updates and privacy-related content!

Last week, a few small (but significant) improvements landed in the web client. These improvement make the web client much more pleasant to use and fixed two long-standing issues on our bug tracker.

Better date & time picker

The first version of the web client used the native browser date & time pickers. Nowadays browsers (should) support these, and those are meant to be the best option.

Unfortunately, we found the support to be too-inconsistent to be relied upon, so we changed to a 3rd party one. However, this 3rd party picker was also sub-optimal, especially on the desktop, though we stuck to it because it was the best we had at the time.

Fast forward to last week, we were finally able to update to Material-UI pickers, which offer a much nicer look and much more pleasant experience. Including on the desktop!

You can check it out by creating a new event, and editing the start or end date.

Collection editing

In EteSync, both calendars and task lists have a colour associated with them, and that colour is synchronised across your clients.

However, up until last week, this colour was not editable from the web client. This is no longer the case. You can now see the collection's colour in the collection list, and edit the collection's colour from the collection edit screen.

Recurrence rule design improvements

As you may remember from the previous development update, the web client finally supports editing recurrence rules. In order to get it in everyone's hands as soon as possible, we cut some corners with the designs, and it was quite ugly.

It was now given a bit of design love, and while there is still more way to go, it looks much better, and more consistent with the rest of the event editing UI.

As usual, we would like to remind you that we rely on your feedback and contributions to make EteSync better. Do you have any suggestions or are experiencing any issues? Please send patches, report issues or just contact us.

Follow us on Mastodon, Twitter, Facebook, reddit or RSS for the latest updates and privacy-related content!

With all of the work on the iOS client and improving the EteSync DAV bridge, we forgot to mention some of the web clients improvements that got in recently. We have implemented a few long requested features, fixed a very annoying bug and some other smaller but still annoying ones.

One the biggest features that has been implemented recently is the Timezone support. Before this recent improvements it wasn't possible to edit event timezones, and it wasn't always clear what's going on when editing events that have a timezone. This has now been fixed and editing timezones works as expected!

Recurring events support was added to the web client almost from the beginning, though while you were always able to view them, you were not able to create them. This has changed recently when Tal Leibman took to the task and added the ability to edit an event's recurrence rule. Huge kudos, and thanks a lot from all of us who use recurring events. :)

As said above, there have been a myriad of bug fixes, to all areas of the web client. We fixed a bug creating causing issues when initiating new accounts, another bug with verifying files are not malformed when importing, and many other issues. Though the most annoying issue has to be with how we used to deal with "grouped vobject properties". You probably noticed it when some of your contact phone numbers weren't recognised as phone numbers, but were rather showing as auxiliary fields. We added a workaround to fix this, because this was not actually a bug in the web client, but rather a bug with ical.js, the library we use for vobject parsing.

In addition, we are happy to announce that we started working on significantly improving and redesigning the tasks management part of the web client. This has been a long requested feature echoed by quite a few people. The work, as currently planned, is based on the suggestions in this ticket, so please comment there and let us know if you have any thoughts regarding how this should look and what it should include. You can also follow the pull request live, as it progresses.

There is also another tasks related surprise we have planned that we hope to announce in the coming weeks. Stay tuned!

Oh and in case you missed it, we are now also on reddit, come and join us there!

As usual, we would like to remind you that we rely on your feedback and contributions to make EteSync better. Do you have any suggestions or are experiencing any issues? Please send patches, report issues or just contact us.

Follow us on Mastodon, Twitter, Facebook, reddit or RSS for the latest updates and privacy-related content!

Until next time!