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During the Summer and Autumn we have done a few new icloud releases. They have been smaller fixes but we have also added some more major features.
Dayplan Mail
The Dayplan application now includes email functionality with contact handling. Currently we have IMAP support where you'll need an IMAP account that icloud can then hook up to. What you need in order to use the email functionality:
- An email address
- Email account information from your email provider that supports IMAP
icloud then uses the provided information to connect to your mail provider and fetches the email. What we also do is that if you create folders inside your mail folder system in icloud we will syncronize those changes back to your mail server. You could use this to have a web mail to any email service, as long as they have IMAP support, use it as a normal email client and when you get back home you will get all the changes on your desktop as you made in the cloud. Pretty cool? ;)
In the Calendar parts of the Dayplan application we've updated the look and feel a bit as well as made it simpler to add new appointments by using the different time scales surrounding the calendar view.
MediaCloud
The next new big feature is our MediaCloud application. It's supposed to become our new suite of applications to view pictures and listen to music. We have currently only released the pictures part but the music part is coming up pretty soon.
MediaCloud Pictures is all about helping you organize your family, friends and vacation pictures. You can you can organize your photos in albums and you can create simple slideshows. All uploaded images are automatically thumbnailed and a lot of metadata that may be embedded in the image is extracted (such as image size, date of capture, camera brand etc...). We have three different viewing modes:
- Grid where you see all thumbs side by side (see screenshot)
- Horizontal list with an image view (see screenshot)
- Big image view also showing metadata
Multiple file upload
The MediaCloud application is pretty pointless unless you have uploaded some media files to use it with. The problem we solved now is that you we're able to only upload one file at a time which can get pretty boring pretty fast. Enter multiple file upload. With this little addon it's now possible to upload many files at a time and you will also get feedback on current status on the uploads so you always know if a file is almost done or somewhere in the middle.
Unzip
Another way to transport several files to the server is to first zip (compress) them into a single file and then use the new unzip functionality that will decompress the files on the server. The new files will be added in a new folder default named after the zip archive.
Document Explorer updates
We've added support to open different document types (such as PDF and Flash movies) directly in their own windows. This makes it feel more like a traditional OS where you can open any file you have a handling application for.
We've also added support to work with multiple selections in the file system etc in order to make the experience of working in the system a lot smoother.
Another feature is that we now have different view types for different kinds of folders. You can for exampel see your contact files displayed in Document Explorer the same way as they are displayed in the Contact application. The same goes for mails, appointments etc... It can be very convenient when you just want to get a quick look of something and you don't want to fire up full applications for it.
Performance
We continually work on improving the perceived performance of the system mainly by reducing the number of requests to the server.
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