NextCloud: Open Source Personal Information Management

I've just revisited OwnCloud suite and found that a decent progress has been made to warrant a viable alternative to Google suite of PIM applications. Here is a quick rundown:

• Calendar -> NextCloud Calendar online, Mozilla Thunderbird on PC
• Contacts -> NextCloud Contacts online, Mozilla Thunderbird + CardBook on PC
• Sync adapter for Android = DAVdroid
• Tasks => OpenTasks or aCalendar+
• Notes => NextCloud Notes (link) for Android

There is a number of providers offering free OwnCloud/NextCloud hosting. Even the minimal options with 500MB or 1GB should be free to host important files and PIM data (calendar, contacts).

NextCloud applications allow downloading calendars as .ics and contacts as .vcf files, which can be used for ocassional backup. If a server goes down, you always have the backup available on your device where the data was last edited.

The next step might be to run own NextCloud instance on Raspberry Pi or something similar.

Desktop multiplatform GUI options

Thinking of creating a desktop application nowadays is really a pain. Multiple platforms and no definitive way to share the UI although no major functionality changes have been introduced in a long time.

Some options, for .NET framework, are listed at GUI Toolkits page at Mono Project web site. One interesting framework is GTK#, which uses the very-popular GTK UI framework.

While .NET has been introduced onto multiple platforms, it will be interesting to see if GTK# works equally well for a multi-platform UI.

Windows 10 update 1703

There is a bunch of new things added in Windows 10 update 1703, as listed here. Unfortunately, I do not need a single thing listed on that page.

My enthusiasm about new updates is currently at level zero. And I see it going into negative if new updates full of features I don't need keep coming along.