When setting up a new device or application, you're now given the option to create a username and password specific for this device. This greatly improves security, because it also allows you to delete it if you lose it or it gets stolen (fingers crossed that wont happen to you, though!). Another benefit of using custom usernames and passwords is: If you need to change your main fruux password, you wont also have to change the configuration of your devices.

Besides the usual bugfixes and performance optimizations the main changes in this release are:

• Completely revamped device management.
• Additional front end polish and tweaks.

Did you already use our "Suggest a feature" function? If not, take a look at the existing ideas, comment and add your own ideas and eventually see them in future version of fruux.

Now: Go ahead and login at http://fruux.com to check it out.

It's mostly a tiny bugfix release, but besides fixes it also includes:

• Calendar syncing support for the Nokia N9.

Go ahead and login at http://fruux.com if you want to setup your Nokia N9.

Besides lots of bugfixes and little improvements the main changes in this release are:

• Much faster syncing on iOS devices (and others using time-range or component filters).
• We're now correctly detecting OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion) machines in our activity feed.
• Many content & design tweaks and spelling fixes (thanks for your bug reports!).

Did you already use our "Suggest a feature" function? If not, take a look at the existing ideas, comment and add your own ideas and eventually see them in future version of fruux.

We're excited that our website http://fruux.com is much more popular than it used to be before the relaunch. However these additional visitors also result in a lot more traffic and load on the respective frontend servers. We already had that in mind, when we started working on the new website and built it in a way that allows us to use a content management system but still publish the site as a pure static website.

We're using wget in this setup to create the actual "compiled" site that gets published on our production systems. Unfortunately wget is not included in OS X by default, but luckily it's easy to download and built it from source.

If you also need wget on your machine, just copy the following few lines and paste them in Terminal.app.
They'll always download and install the latest version of wget on your machine.

(Update: Alternatively use Homebrew - a straightforward replacement for MacPorts: http://mxcl.github.com/homebrew/. Thanks, Evert.
If you want to remove the manually installed version of wget before switching to Homebrew, just repeat the steps below and replace the line "sudo make install -C ~/Downloads/wget-latest/" with "sudo make uninstall -C ~/Downloads/wget-latest/")

# download latest wget version
curl -o ~/Downloads/wget-latest.tar.gz http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/wget/wget-latest.tar.gz

# create temp directory for extraction
mkdir ~/Downloads/wget-latest

# extract into temp directory
tar xzf ~/Downloads/wget-latest.tar.gz --strip-components=1 -C ~/Downloads/wget-latest

# build and install wget
cd ~/Downloads/wget-latest/ && ./configure
make -C ~/Downloads/wget-latest/
sudo make install -C ~/Downloads/wget-latest/

# cleanup
rm ~/Downloads/wget-latest.tar.gz
rm -rf ~/Downloads/wget-latest

If you are interested in details about our static website setup, let us know and we'll follow-up with another blog post with more details if our workload allows it.

Those of you following our Facebook page already know it, but for the sake of completeness we're cross posting it here.

We've launched support for iOS calendar syncing on July 29th. It's available to our pro users and quite easy to setup. Check our Facebook post for details. It's still an early preview, but we're working on fixing all bugs that pop up and once you're and we're happy with it, we'll shift our focus to contacts syncing.

Today we've also relaunched http://fruux.com. After uncountable night shifts, we proudly present a completely new look, a significantly improved support center and a consistent design throughout all sub-sites.

Oh, and we're hiring - take a look at our "Work with us" page.

Wednesday night we took the time to record a short video to show you a little demo of our upcoming fruux iOS calendar syncing feature. It was already a bit late and we had just an iPhone... so sorry for the bad video quality. :-)

If you want to get realtime updates about our day-to-day work you should definitely follow our fruux Facebook page.

We're currently suffering from occasional uptime issues which are caused by a MySQL bug (#55284, #55543) triggered in certain and causing short downtimes for our service. Luckily we've now implemented an automatic recovery process which is launched in these situations to bring the service back online quickly whenever this problem occurs.

As far as we know this bug was fixed in MySQL 5.1.56 (which was released on March 7th) and MySQL 5.5.10 (which is not yet released).

We're in close contact with the product manager and his team at Amazon RDS and have high hopes for a quick roll-out of the fixed MySQL versions which will permanently resolve our current occasional uptime issues.

We'll add a free month of usage to your fruux pro accounts as a little compensation for the current problems once the issue is resolved.

Since some of you don't check our posts via Facebook and/or Twitter we'll just cross-post our latest Facebook post here:

We're nearing our iOS calendar syncing beta test with huge steps. We'll at first pick a couple of early supporters and then sequentially roll out to more users while monitoring how our systems handle the additional load. Once we are satisfied with these tests, we'll make iOS calendar syncing available to all pro users and then work full force on the iOS contact syncing implementation.

We're also working on a ton of other amazing stuff we can't talk about right now. ;) Oh and b.t.w. we are currently looking for actual office space. Once we've found a nice place you are happily invited for a chat and a coffee if you are near by.

Happy New Year everybody! We've been working on a lot of stuff during the last months and have some pretty amazing news to share with you.

Our launch of fruux pro took us a lot longer than expected, a lot of administrative tasks popped up along the way and we still have tons of quirks to work out, but on the other hand we have also made a lot of progress and wanted to give you a short update on it.

Amazon Web Services, one of our infrastructure parters, recently published a case study about fruux, giving you an overview about the technical aspects of fruux while also delivering a brief introduction into the history of our project.

But now, without further the important stuff for 2011:
We've worked amazingly hard during the last months to make support for iOS devices happen as quickly as possible and even we weren't able to launch a first alpha version as a new year surprise as we had initially planned, we're sure that you'll like it once it's finally rolled out.

We've been joined by a new developer who's been working solely on our iOS implementation since then.

Hi, my name is Evert and I'm the latest member of the fruux team. I spend most of my time engineering web application backends, and dedicated a great deal of my time working on CalDAV and CardDAV implementations, which is also what I'll be integrating into fruux. These technologies are extensions to WebDAV and are actually supported by more and more devices & applications and provide for seamless data synchronization.

What this means is, that we'll be able to deliver on the promise of one of the most requested fruux features: iOS synchronization. We'll start with CalDAV support which allows you to sync calendars with your iOS devices and then continue our work with the CardDAV support which will allow you to sync your Address books.

We'll be keeping you posted on our progress.

--Evert

Great news, right? We hope to give you an update on our progress really soon. Other goals for 2011 include a fruux web application (which is planned to be based on the upcoming CalDAV and CardDAV stack) and an API to allow developers building great services and applications around fruux.

We've started rolling out pro accounts to our existing users a few days ago and so far we are pretty pleased with the performance of our billing system. There are still a few minor kinks we are working on right now, but all in all it was a solid rollout.

Interestingly fruux also starts getting popular in certain new places. We've for instance received a direct comment (okay it was a reply to an email from us, but anyway) from a top-level person at a certain company telling us that he already knew fruux and will check it out (Hi!). :-) Additionally we've even got a few sign-ups from people working at this other company with the fruit in the logo (probably caused by our third party promotion - if you are developing software, you should certainly try that, too. We read about it in the Mac Indie Marketing blog).

Now that the rollout of fruux pro started, we'll also start enforcing the free-account limits for existing users in the near future. Honestly we have no final decision yet, but our idea is to limit free accounts to just one "data class" (contacts OR calendars OR bookmarks) and just two Macs. Future support for iOS devices will also be limited to fruux pro accounts. But our current top priority is adding iOS support to pro accounts and not enforcing the limits of free accounts.