Nextcloud Hub 26 Spring is launching today! I woke up to the announcement that a livestream had been underway in the early morning my time here on the USA west coast. Pity I missed it! But I will be looking out for the recap video in the coming days.
Scanning the launch announcement, it looks like they are making some improvements to the design which I am looking forward to. Personally I’ve switched my sites to using alot of black on white to try to match my Discourse site and to avoid being distracted by it.
They also are launching a new “Euro-Office” official default office suite, which is also open source but provides “best” compatibility with Microsoft documents. It also performs better than Collabora which is what I have been using lately and like alot, but have been finding to be a bit slow in the web browser. Apparently we self-hosters will be able to switch to it easily!
Euro-Office also works directly in the Nextcloud app on iOS and Android, which is an improvement over Collabora which requires separate apps. Also Euro-Office has some integration with other Nextcloud features like Deck cards, calendars, etc.
I’ve also been wanting to use the Nextcloud text editor more, which has a separate mobile app. They’ve apparently improved it so it will work even if your internet cuts out for up to 5 minutes. Nextcloud Text is more lightweight and uses markdown which I am already very familiar with from Discourse. Added advantage is I can copy/paste between platforms!
However, I have been experimenting with another open source app called outline, recommended by the good people at Fight for the Future at their degoogling webinar last week. Outline has a cleaner interface and has wonderful collaboration features (including the ability to select some text and add a comment about it). It also allows creating collections of documents and selectively publishing or sharing them, which might be a solution for documentation here.
Nextcloud is a massive platform and project, and it’s a massive undertaking to maintain and improve it all. I am super impressed by the progress they are making these days, and am looking forward to keeping an eye on it all and helping more people to adopt nextcloud.
There are many more improvements than the ones I’ve touched on above so do recommend taking the time to watch the launch video when they post it.