Inside Funambol

Funambol MediaHub Video Contest Round 2 - Win an HTC Flyer!

noreply@blogger.com (francesco mapelli) — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 16:22:00 +0000

You probably were all on vacation, and only one brave participant completed the submission for the MediaHub Video Contest on time. This means an easy first prize for our friend Thomas!

Take a look at the "Why Funambol?" video by Thomas

Congrats Thomas! We will send you the HTC Flyer soon.

But this also means we still have one HTC Flyer to give away :)

We don't want to have gifts meant for you hanging in our offices, so we decided to launch Round 2 of the MediaHub Video Contest: the rules are the same, but the deadline for Round 2 is October 2nd at 11:59:59 PM PDT.

Videos will be published on our Facebook page on October 5th, and the video with the highest number of 'Like' at 7am PDT (2 PM UTC) on October 21st will be selected as winner of one HTC Flyer.

This time I think we'll have more participants, so it won't be easy as it was for Thomas to win... but who knows? Anyway, try to do your best!

Additional detail: the "Why Funambol?" video by Thomas will not count for Round 2 :)

Win one of two HTC Flyer with Funambol MediaHub Video Contest

noreply@blogger.com (francesco mapelli) — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 15:35:00 +0000

Funambol starts with fun, so we're announcing MediaHub Video Contest!

This is a good chance to have fun and win an HTC Flyer.

To partecipate in the contest you've to create a video about Funambol MediaHub and upload it to our public FTP before August 31st.
We'll publish the videos on Funambol Facebook Page and at the end of the contest the two videos with highest number of "Likes" will win the prizes!

Read more on the Funambol MediaHub Video Contest!

Update:The original first prize was an Apple iPad 2, but it came to our knowledge that Apple 3rd Party Promotional Policy forbids to put iPads as prizes for contests. For this reason, we are forced to change the first prize to another HTC Flyer. We apologize for any inconvenient this may cause.

Free premium myFUNAMBOL account for first 200 users that fill up our survey!

noreply@blogger.com (francesco mapelli) — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 13:33:00 +0000

Funambol is conducting a survey to learn about peoples' views towards personal cloud services, such as the forthcoming Apple iCloud.

The first 200 people to fill out the survey receive a free one-year premium subscription for a 5 Gigabyte account on the myFUNAMBOL portal, a $34.99 value. After 200 surveys are received, this offer will no longer be available.

The survey takes only a few minutes and your data will only be reported upon in aggregate. To take the survey, please go to
https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/funpcloudsurvey

You can also request a free copy of the survey results.
Fill the survey now!

Announcing Cloud Sniper Program - earn money developing on Cloud APIs

noreply@blogger.com (francesco mapelli) — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 15:22:00 +0000

Hello!
Today we're launching the Cloud Sniper Program, a new community program that rewards developers working with our Cloud APIs to increase number of connected devices and make it easier to access content stored in the Funambol Cloud.

Our JSON Cloud APIs, available on our Carrier Edition servers such as my.funambol.com, make easy to access, add and modify content of the cloud.
As an example, this is a call that returns a json object with pictures information: (change username and password to your myfunambol credentials to see it working)

http://my.funambol.com/sapi/media/picture?action=get&login=USERNAME&password=PASSWORD

Thanks to CAPI, it is possible to build applications for virtually any connected device, CMS, programming environment you can think of that interact with content stored in the Funambol cloud.

Rules for participating to the Cloud Sniper Program are very simple:

1) submit your proposal, discuss it with the community and get approval
2) code and release to the community
3) collect your bounty (up to 500$)

To learn more and get started, read the detailed instructions at the Cloud Sniper page!

Funambol v10 - MediaHub - is GA!

noreply@blogger.com (francesco mapelli) — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 10:50:00 +0000

Hi all!
today we're announcing Funambol v10 - MediaHub.
It is like iCloud but for all devices, and available now :)
To get more information you can:

read the official MediaHub press release
read some more information on the MediaHub solution page
take a look at the sneak peak if you missed it
read the Release Notes
try it by getting a free account at my.funambol.com, if you don't have already

Also the Community Edition V10 has been released, you can download the new version of server and clients from the Download Page or read the Community Edition Release Notes.

myFUNAMBOL upgrade plan for v10

noreply@blogger.com (francesco mapelli) — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 11:23:00 +0000

The wait is almost over! Next week we'll upgrade myFUNAMBOL portal to the new Funambol v10!
Since we're adding Videos and Files sync, we changed a bit the architecture, and we need some time to migrate your data to the new one.

To reduce downtime, we have the following plan for the upgrade:

On Monday 6th 9:00 am CET - 12:00 am PDT (Los Angeles) we'll bring the service down for approximately 30 minutes, to upgrade the servers to v10.

After this, we need to migrate the data, so we'll disable all media users (i.e. users that have pictures in the Funambol Cloud) and we'll migrate them to the new architecture starting with premium and ultimate users..

While your account is disabled, you won't be able to login to the portal and perform syncs. We'll re-enable users as soon as the account is migrated. We expect to be able to complete the migration of all the users in 24 hours, this means that in the worst case you'll have your service restored by Monday 7th 9:00 am CET - 12:00 am PDT.

To get updates, follow our twitter stream and Facebook page!

Update: migration has been completed successfully, and new clients are on the Apple Store and Android Market! Try them!

Funambol Windows Sync Client v10 on Linux

noreply@blogger.com (Ste) — Mon, 30 May 2011 13:23:00 +0000

Ok, I admit, I can't help doing things counter flow and I haven't given up on using Linux on my laptop. I tried everything else, but always went back to my dear little Linux. I am not one of those that knows all the ins and outs of the Linux system and I never compiled the kernel. That's too much even for me :)
Now that the dependency on Outook for the Funambol Windows Client is gone (a cool new feature of v10), encouraged by great Alfredo, I decided to try to make it to work on my system using wine. I use Fedora 14 on my netbook and it was much easier than expected!
I do not want to waste your time reading a lot of instructions for a task that resulted to be very easy. This is what I have done:

System>Administration>Add/Remove software: I searched for wine and installed it. It found out all the dependencies and asked confirmation to install. I pressed Ok.
After installation, I configured wine keeping pretty much all defaults; wine requested to install a few additional packages, but it has done it on its own.
I downloaded the new Funambol Windows Client v10 and opened it with the wine launcher.
The setup program started, ran and completed successfully. Cool!
I inserted my credentials and started to sync. Beautiful!

Tweaks
The installation program installs a link to the MediaHub folder on the Desktop. The link generated does not actually work, but wouldn't it be even better just to have a link to the native MediaHub folder? To do so, just create a MediaHub.desktop file on yor desktop with this content:

#!/usr/bin/env xdg-open
[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=MediaHub
GenericName=Funambol MediaHub files
URL[$e]=$HOME/.wine/dosdevices/c:/users/ste/My Documents/MediaHub/
Icon=$HOME.wine/dosdevices/c:/Program Files/Funambol/Windows Client/images/MediaHubFolder.ico
Type=Link

Of course you have to replace c:/users/ste with your username.

Known issues
Scheduled sync does not work. I am thinking of creating a branded version of the client called Funambol Wine Sync Client with scheduled sync disabled.

Screenshots

Funambol v10 Sneak Peek

noreply@blogger.com (francesco mapelli) — Tue, 17 May 2011 15:57:00 +0000

We're approaching the release of Funambol V10, (codename Quattro) and following the tradition we started with V9 I'm happy to give you an overview of what will be included in this new release.

Presenting MediaHub

Funambol v10 is the first MediaHub release. We focused on media sync, increasing the media support with videos and files sync, and improving the clients to allow bidirectional sync and an an easy and real sharing experience across phones, tablets and computers.

We implemented different set of default behaviours on different devices, depending on the type of data that is being synced, to make it easier for user to access their data in the easiest way.

New Funambol Windows Client

With v10 we're introducing the new Funambol Windows Client.

Based on the Outlook Client, that replaces completely, it allows Windows users to sync pictures, videos and files in the MediaHub folder without the need to have Microsoft Outlook installed.
When Outlook is installed, the client additionally allows to sync Outlook PIM data.

iPhone / iPad clients

We added the Video sync (files sync on iPhone/iPad is planned for a future release), improved the UI and the mobile signup, added the capability to sync in background

Android and Blackberry clients

We added the Video and File sync, improved the UI, addedd WBXML support and improved SyncML and Mobile Signup support.

Web Portal

We added Video and File pages, we replaced the My Pictures widget with a My Media widget that includes videos and pictures. We improved the quota handling, added share on YouTube for videos, improved supportability and performances for API calls.

We have now a new My Tablet widget, next to the My Phone one.

We'll soon upgrade my.funambol.com and the clients, so you'll be able to play with the MediaHub. Follow us on twitter or join our Facebook Page to receive updates!

What's going on with myFUNAMBOL?

noreply@blogger.com (francesco mapelli) — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 15:11:00 +0000

Hi All,

In the past few days, we've had growing pains with the myFUNAMBOL portal, mostly due to an unprecedented load. Behind the scenes, we have been transitioning myFUNAMBOL from a casual demo site to a production site.

We were planning to complete this transition when we upgraded to Funambol v10, aka MediaHub, later this quarter, but this surge of demand is causing us to reconsider plans and we may now accelerate some improvements to accommodate the new high usage level.

We are sorry to keep you waiting, we're working hard to get myFUNAMBOL back online as soon as possible and to avoid similar situations in the future.

We will be posting updates about the service on the Funambol twitter account and Funambol Facebook page.

Thank you for your patience.

Update 21st April, 3.47pm UTC: myFUNAMBOL is back online, thanks again for your patience!

About https support on myFUNAMBOL

noreply@blogger.com (francesco mapelli) — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 13:32:00 +0000

Recently we've received a few requests to add support for https on my.funambol.com.

Altought the product fully support https, some issues may arise as some older phone are not able to support https.

This affect native syncs on those devices but also some phones running our Symbian client (the Funambol Symbian client relay on native sync engine to perform the sync, this means that if the native sync engine does not support https our Symbian client is affected as well).

For this reason, up to now, we have not forced https on myFUNAMBOL, as we want users with older phones to benefit of the service.

On the other side, we understand your requests for https support, and we can't allow older devices to prevent improvements and increased security, so we decided that we will add https support on myFUNAMBOL soon.

We don't have a date yet, as this requires some work and planning, and we need to schedule it when it makes more sense, but we'll tweet or blog something as soon as we have news.

Funambol Online Documentation Portal released

noreply@blogger.com (Davide) — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 12:00:00 +0000

We're happy to announce today an update to our current documentation: we've launched a new online portal where you will find our documents in a web-based form. You can access it at http://docs.funambol.com

The project enables users to take advantage of advanced capabilities, such as easy searching, browsing with tags and ability to send us feedbacks and comments. From our side, we are using DocBook to write our documentation: this is another great improovement that will bring better documents, exported in both html and pdf formats.

Currently, the documents available are three:

These documents come from our carrier edition, but they will be helpful for community edition users as well; we plan to eventually publish all of our documentation there. To be always informed on the new documents released, you can subscribe to the RSS feed: http://docs.funambol.com/feed

Introducing Premium accounts on myFUNAMBOL, up to 50GB of storage

noreply@blogger.com (francesco mapelli) — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 14:17:00 +0000

Today we're introducing premium accounts on myFUNAMBOL.

Currently the basic free account offer 50MB of storage, but with the large adoption and increased picture sync usage we received a growing number of requests for additional storage on our portal.

So we're happy to offer advanced plans that allows users to safely store up to 50GB of data.

We offer two paid plans

Premium plan, 5GB of storage, at $34.99/yr
Ultimate plan, 50GB of storage, at $99,99/yr

The upgrade process can be done directly on the portal, payment is sent securely using Paypal account or your credit card.

More information are available on the press release.

Happy Syncing with Funambol!

What are we working on? March 11 1st iteration

noreply@blogger.com (francesco mapelli) — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 16:16:00 +0000

The teams are working mainly on media sync:

Java team is working on improving picture upload on android and Blackberry, and starting the video download on Blackberry, plus testing the android sdk 3.0 and doing certification of the Android client on Android 2.3
Portal team is defining the API for quota handling, fixing bugs, and adding the new "my Tablet" widget on the portal UI
C++ team is working on upload picture on the iPhone and windows client

Funambol: “It’s like MobileMe for BlackBerry!”

noreply@blogger.com (francesco mapelli) — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 19:15:00 +0000

Yes, it is.

We launched last week www.mm4bb.com , a portal that highlight in a simple and clean way the feature we offer at my.funambol.com from a BlackBerry user prespective.

We wanted to highlight how myFUNAMBOL is perceived from the BlackBerry users that tried it... thanks to the new feature of v9 (Mobile Signup particularly) syncing devices with Funambol is really simpler than ever.

We've got some coverage on news sites, and lots of tweets. Thanks to all who mentioned us and our solution!

For those of us still with a #BlackBerry: Funambol syncs your PIM data and photos with the #Cloud http://bit.ly/dKx4Zd
@krlayton

Wireless Sync your BlackBerry to PC via Funambol http://bit.ly/elrP0u
@Markaveli420

Funambol sincronizacion en la nube y es gratis full usefull se los recomiendo funambol.com
@Lchagua

APP OF THE DAY: Funambol wireless sync (BlackBerry) http://bit.ly/hlp0G l
@TVegaTed

Good news you Crackberries; you can sync without a cable. And it's free.http://bit.ly/eRJTt3
@mattosumisu

You can now sync your Outlook email and calendar with your Blackberry--without an IT guy. It's about time! #Funambol #RIM
@seander01

Para aquellos que siguen empeñados en comparar BlackBerry y iPhone. Funambol al rescate de la sincronización (y gratis) http://mm4bb.com/
@Soukron

What are we working on? Jan '11

noreply@blogger.com (francesco mapelli) — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 13:35:00 +0000

We've had an exciting start of the year in Funambol: we've taken big decisions and started a lot of work. Features are being added, plans are being... well, planned, and ideas are flowing.

The big news is that we're pushing harder on media sync, and in the upcoming months we'll support more media types, starting from videos, and we'll change heavily the sync experience, to make it more user friendly. For those of you that will be in Barcelona for the Mobile World Congress, you can have a preview of our MediaHub at MWC, Booth 1J46.

The teams have been rearranged, and worked on the design of our new media share solution and on new APIs, and they also added a few sweet features. We've dozen of whiteboards with diagrams in the office, here are a few pictures. It makes me feel comfortable that on one of the whiteboards with the design I've seen a big skull, stating "DEATH PROOF". :)

As I said, the design effort has not prevented our devs to push out a few fresh features in this days:

The C++ team added the Background Sync on the iPhone: it is now possible to close the app while it's syncing, and the sync will continue in the background. The new version of the app will be available soon on the Apple Store.

The Java team was mainly focused on customers request, but was able to kick a great improvement on the contacts sync performances on Android, almost doubling our contacts sync speed.

The Portal team improved the mobile signup, the media APIs, added better functionalities for remote storage, allowing faster load time of the picture thumbnails on the portal and worked on the video sync UI.

The next release seems quite promising... can't wait to see what else is coming! ;)

Funambol V9 is out, and other great news

noreply@blogger.com (francesco mapelli) — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 16:32:00 +0000

Today we're announcing Funambol v9. We have a Press Release, and we've already discussed in the sneak peak some features, but here's the complete list, directly from from the v9 release notes

Server:

HTTP-based Send Log (from clients to server)

iPhone Sync Client:

Login/Logout (in place of account setting)
Sync All/Cancel Sync
Reset (in place of cleanup)
HTTP-based Send Log feature
Logging improvements (log rotation, context info)
Resize of contacts' pictures for Contacts sync
Removal of one-way sync for Contacts sync
Support for iOS4

Android Sync Client:

Address books import (from other accounts into Funambol address book)
Capability to set Funambol as default address book
Login/Logout (in place of account setting)
Capability to switch from Multi-source to Single-source UI based on source support server side
Removal of one-way sync for contacts sync
Support for Android 2.2

BlackBerry Sync Client:

Login/Logout (in place of account screen)
Capability to switch from Multi-source to Single-source UI based on source support server side
Removal of one-way sync for contacts, calendar, tasks, notes sync
Support for BBOS 6
Discontinued support for BBOS 4.3

Symbian Sync Client:

Flexibility in handling of sync sources in UI: capability to add/remove sources and to change the order (build time)
Autoscroll to include the syncing source
Removal of one-way sync for contacts, calendar&tasks, notes sync
Support for Symbian^3

Windows Mobile Sync Client:

Removal of one-way sync for contacts, calendar, tasks, notes, briefcase sync

Outlook Sync Client:

Capability to handle vCards without all fields filled
Removal of one-way sync for contacts, calendar, tasks, notes sync

We will release calendar sync on Android very soon, our demo portal at my.funambol.com has been already upgraded to v9, we've removed the 90 day limit for all our users, and we doubled the picture storage.

Oh, I love giving good news :)

Happy syncing with Funambol v9!

Lifelong accounts on my.funambol.com

noreply@blogger.com (francesco mapelli) — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 11:02:00 +0000

Great news for everybody!

Following the success of our Lifelong account for ScheduleWorld users campaign, we decided to drop the 90-day limit for ALL the my.funambol.com users. This means that all the current users account have been turned into permanent accounts, and new accounts will be permanent as well!

If you don't have an account yet, signup now or download the Funambol app from the app market and signup from inside the application.

From now on, we're offering myFUNAMBOL as Beta service, this means we'll be adding new exciting features more frequently than before, but you may occasionally experience glitches or bugs. If you spot bugs, please report them at http://bit.ly/fun-help

We are in the process of releasing also Funambol V9, we're waiting for approval of our apps in the various app stores, so in the next few days you will receive updates with our new clients :)

More information on V9 features coming soon!

Scheduleworld users get lifelong account on my.funambol.com

noreply@blogger.com (francesco mapelli) — Fri, 17 Dec 2010 09:59:00 +0000

Unfortunately Scheduleworld.com has been recently shut down.

To all the Scheduleworld users, we have a good news for you: as Christmas is approaching, we decided to offer you a lifelong myFUNAMBOL account if you signup before January, 31st.

Just point your browser to http://bit.ly/funschdl and signup from that page.

That's it.

The welcome email will talk about a 90-day trial, but don't worry: that's the default email, but you've been automatically added to the list of the permanent users.

Welcome to myFUNAMBOL!

What are we working on? Approaching RC

noreply@blogger.com (francesco mapelli) — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 11:24:00 +0000

The teams are mainly focused on QA and bugfixing for V9, we're now at 90% of testing process and we should be able to finish testing V9 this week.

We have a very small number of bugs to fix and the plan is to get a release candidate (RC) build at the beginning of the next week. This means that if no major issues are found that we can estimate the GA on the second week of January

The portal team is working also on our next release (codename Quattro), adding features to the mobile signup and improving automatic device detection and device mapping

What are we working on? V9 Stabilization

noreply@blogger.com (francesco mapelli) — Thu, 25 Nov 2010 14:38:00 +0000

We officially entered into Stabilization.
This means that no code is going to be committed to V9 unless some major bug is discovered.
Our teams are mainly focused on testing now.
Only Java team and Portal team are developing new features that are going to be released in the next release, codename Quattro

Java team is working on adding few features on BlackBerry and Android, mainly support for WBXML, support for suspend and resume sync (that's something our server team has started working on a few iteration ago), and SMS push on Android devices.

The Portal Team (a.k.a. Bugazza team) is working on Phase 2 of Mobile Signup that will bring mobile signup to all the device we support, will include better device detection and a mobile portal that will allow users to performs basic operation such as change password and download client.

Funambol V9 Sneak Peek

noreply@blogger.com (francesco mapelli) — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 13:54:00 +0000

We're entering stabilization of Funambol V9 (Codename Cabriolet), and we can give some informations on what will be included in the new major release:

Mobile Signup will be available for smartphones in two flavours:

In-client mobile signup for iPhone, Android and Blackberry devices
on this devices it would be possible to signup to the Funambol portal directly from the Funambol Client
In-browser signup for Windows Mobile and Symbian devices:
on this devices a mobilized webpage will allow the users to signup and get the Funambol client

This image is the first step of the mobile signup on an Android emulator

We added Portal Localization. The demo portal my.funambol.com will be available also Italian, but more languages will be added soon.

We have a great comeback, the iPhone Picture Sync! In a previous post we said it would not fit into V9, but our great team solved the usability issue, so get ready to sync iPhone pictures to the Cloud!

V9 clients will be shipped with no one way sync, as we already previewed at the beginning of the iteration. The feature is confusing and due to the protocol specifications it often causes users to get upset by the unexpected client behaviour. Removing the feature seems to be the best way to avoid unexpected syncs.

Our server is now ready to receive logs from clients via http to offer better supportability. The feature will be added client side in the next future.

We added dynamic switching of UI from single-source to multiple-source mode, so if the server you sync to supports only one source (e.g. only the pictures) you will be displayed with a clean one-button UI. Note that is something that need to be changed server side: disabling all source but one on client side will not enable the single button UI.

On Android we've a bandwith saver and contacts import functionality that allows migrating contacts from other accounts you may have on your device to the Funambol account.

We added support for Symbian^3 devices and BB OS 6

All this good stuff is coming soon, in Funambol V9! Stay tuned for more informations and leaks ;)

What are we working on? Nov'10 2nd Iteration

noreply@blogger.com (francesco mapelli) — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 13:16:00 +0000

In Funambol we have the so called Scrum of Scrums meeting at the beginning of each iteration. In this meeting a member of each scrum team share the team's backlog with the other teams. This allows teams to coordinate and have an overview of what's going on in the other teams.

Starting from today, we will briefly summarize each Scrum of Scrum here, so that the community is aware of what's going on inside Funambol and get a taste of what new features we're working on. I hope you like the idea :)

Scrum Of Scrum - November 2010, second iteration

Bugazza team

Mobile signup
Bug fixing on portal admin

C++ team

iPhone mobile signup
One way sync removal on clients
Disable picture sync on iphone - usability issues, moved to next release.

Java team

Mobile signup on bb & android
One way sync removal on BB & Android
Work on Android calendar sync
Bug fixing

Server team

Resume sync functionality
Mobile signup server capabilities
Supportability: cleanup of client logs
Bug fixing (twins detection)
Phone Pack

I guess some explanation is needed for some of the points, here you go:

Mobile Signup: this is one of the new features we're working on, basically it is the option to signup to the Funambol server (e.g. my.funambol.com) directly from the application, without having to signup from a desktop pc, so you can get the app on your phone and starting to synchronize data immiediatly.
One Way Sync Removal: we are removing one way sync from our clients, as it is misleading for the user since even if the user sets the client to one way sync, if a slow sync is triggered it will be two-way. There are also a few corner cases that cause unintuitive behavior, so we think it's better to remove completely the one way sync.
Disabling Picture Sync on the iPhone: that was a thought decision as we know it's a very requested feature. Unfortunately Apple constraints caused usability issues, and the user was requested to wander around menus and popups and do something like 12 clicks to get the first sync started. We do not want to release an application with suboptimal user experience, so we have postponed the release of this feature while we implement a workaround. Current plan is to have the feature ready in the first quarter of 2011.

Public Test Driven Pair Programming Session

noreply@blogger.com (francesco mapelli) — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 12:47:00 +0000

Today our CTO Stefano Fornari and our Chief Architect Stefano Nichele had a public test driven pair programming session, open to developers to attend and to follow.

As an exercise they decided to fix a bug on server side.

A few developers attended the session and contributed to the discussion, suggesting different approaches and opinions.

Discussion raised about various topics, from specific code options (Should we use a List or a Set? Why?) to more abstract, controversial and interesting issues

Is TDD driving us to create the algorithm?
Is this the optimal algorithm?
What would have happened if we had started from the implementation and added the tests later?
Can additional brainstorming bring us to a better design?
Is it worth to change the design now to improve maintainability or should we let it as it is and improve it only when new requirements will come?

the final outcome was some well-tested and working code, and lots of food for thought :)