Last week we released the first official version of Remus, version 0.1. Don't be confused by the version number, we have chosen this version number because we still have to implement a lot of things until we release 1.0 (hopefully under the umbrella of the Eclipse Foundation) but the current release is almost stable and ready to use. So what are the new features we have implemented in the last two month?
Developer API
The probably biggest part was a refactoring of the different components to make Remus consumable in small parts. As you probably know Remus is not only a standalone tool but can be also used to build complete new applications. Therefore we rebuilt the structure to make it easier to built own applications based on Remus. Another goal for us is to port the current application into the web, so that it runs in a browser.
New connectors
- Google Calendar
If you have a Google Account you can already manage your contacts and calendars with Remus. Connecting to Google services is an important feature for us because many people are already using these services and they are very well accessible through an API. If you're using a cell phone with Android (which heavily uses Google services) you'll get more and more features to synchronize the contents of your cell phone and your desktop with Remus. - WebDAV
In the last months we got many feature requests regarding the online synchronization of the complete workspace. However, Remus uses a mechanism of connectors to synchronize its content with a remote repository, there won't be an additional mechanism to synchronize the contents. For making your content accessible through the web we decided to add WebDAV support, a very simple way to put and get files from a webserver over HTTP. We favorited this prior to FTP because you don't have issues with your firewall and the two biggest german freemailers (GMX and Web.de) offer some free storage which can be accessed via WebDAV. So if you have an account at GMX or Web.de you can start synchronizing all your content of Remus over the internet today.
New information types
- PDF
We started to implement some document management capabilities, the first information type is PDF. Remus can handle PDF documents very well, provides a very nice slider to browse through the pages, indexes the contents of a PDF and supports simple PDF Manipulation features, like setting metadata, splitting and merging of documents.
What else?
- Subsearch Results: Remus provides now finer granulated results on special information types: This is important for information types which have in general much information that can be searched.
- General Rules on Desktop-Drop Rules: We have implemented the possibility to add any Groovy script after a drop/paste of data into the application.
- Performance: We disconvered that the application becomes slow if you are working with very huge information projects (over 10.000 items). The current release is much faster and the starting time could also be reduced by loading different components lazily on-demand.
- Bugfixes: Dozens of fixed bugs
Community
We started a blog where we will publish interesting tips and tricks regarding the daily work of Remus (http://remus-tips.blogspot.com/). If you have a tip, we're waiting for your email :)
We also want to thank all the people that reported bugs and raised feature requests. This helped us very much improving the application. We also received many very good feedback, which motivates for the next challenges.
Today we released the connector for 
