The analogy is not a perfect fit. I have known about webdav since I started in the industry in the early 2000s. So it has been around for a long time. It will not magically become a big hit. It is just too complex for most customers.
That said, we realise there is a small but important group who want it, and we will certainly consider it down the track. Ultimately, I think we would just prefer to add end-to-end encryption so it should not matter which service you use.
Not that it’s likely to happen, but I wish Apple would provide a local iCloud option, where you could set up a local iCloud server that would sync locally rather than everything going up and down to their servers, with an option to also have access via and backup to the web, perhaps only with selected folders. But Apple doesn’t always do what would be helpful to users or companies.
Nearly every popular NAS system (Synology, Qnap) and many self-hosted services like Seafile, Nextcloud, Pydio offers WebDAV, also pure Webservers like Nginx and Apache. WebDAV is there and will be used.
Also it’s not complex for Joe Average or a non-tech family member to type an URL, Username and Password.
This would be a great addon, but if servers data storage isn’t self hosted, it’s still a no-go. Encryption can become insecure and everyone with access is able to decrypt it.
If I write down personal informations from my brain, storage must be like it’s still in my brain - under my control! I want to selectively control if I want to store it elsewhere.
An example:
Guvf vf rapelcgrq jvgu n irel hafrpher zrgubq. Url, vgf abg ernyyl rapelcgrq, vgf whfg n ebgngvba bs punenpgref ol guvegrra.
Everyone with access can start decrypting as long as he want. This text isn’t under my control anymore.
This would be the perfect solution. iCloud (Drive, File, Photo, Backup) on a self-hosted server. I hope for this once a year when WWDC keynote starts.
Apple will be unlikely to ever offer a local iCloud, precisely because this is a niche. Apple rarely direct their attention at such small groups. They are interested in mainstream, consumer products.
I am not ruling out WebDav in Agenda. It would be nice to support it, but it is not at the top of our list, because we have features that impact much larger groups at this point in time.
I don’t think that this number of people is small. Every Nextcloud and owncloud user has easy access to webDAV. So have many users of web hosting services that include it in their storage offerings. Most NAS include the option to use webDAV. Nextcloud by now is pushed by the European government as a secure solution for on-premise and hosted clouds and several hosting providers offer them as a service. It is the cloud solution used by Germany for their “Bundescloud” with more than 300,000 users. The French government is going to use it with more than 100,000 users. My former company is running one for more than 15,000 users and most of them use DAV for their contacts. The big advantage of webDAV is, that it is an open protocol that every storage service can provide and that is easily usable. That’s why Nextcloud is using it as their core technology.
I don’t doubt there are a lot of webDAV deployments, but how much overlap there is with our customer base is less certain. We can only base it on how often people ask for it here in our forums.
We will certainly consider support for webDAV, but there are other options (Box, Microsoft, Google etc) which are probably just as much in demand. It’s not realistic to support everything unfortunately.
True indeed for pro users. My administration use webdav also and most other services are blocked.
I have now upgraded my iCloud account, although it is relatively expensive compared to other options.
I’ve also renewed my annual Agenda subscription. Thanks to the team for your good work.
Thanks for your support!
+1 for WebDav. I recently bought another year of Agenda updates - it’s by far the best note capturing tool I’ve used, but 3P server storage, even encrypted, is not something I can commit to.
WebDav, or integration through Apple Files so that another application can handle the storage, would make Agenda considerably more useful to me.
+1 for WebDav support. I have many colleagues who would benefit from this as well.
I found this thread looking for end-to-end encryption options for Agenda, as I’m coming to really like the software after using it for ~1 month so far. However, as I’ve seen others say in this thread, I can’t fully commit to putting highly sensitive data in here yet without E2E encryption capability.
My question is, if I have Boxcryptor on my computer, can the main library for Agenda be moved inside that folder, to allow Agenda to function with Boxcryptor’s E2EE service? Or is it not that simple, i.e. if I tried to move the file location for the Agenda ‘database’ into another folder on the computer, the sync feature would stop working properly?
I’m afraid this wouldn’t work, the way sync is set up in Agenda is independent from how the files are locally stored.
All I can say is that what users want for synchronisation is rclone.
Free, open-source with a permissible license, works straight out of the box with 40+ cloud providers. You can get a taste for how it works using their CLI tool — and then work to integrate with whatever you wish using its library.
Of course, it’s written in Go, so it’s very likely that no serious Apple-native-app developer will manage to integrate with it (although it’s technically not impossible)…
But I wonder if I can use rclone to sync the local folder containing the Agenda data with whatever I wish to sync with… it’ll work for backups, but I hardly expect it to work for, say, sync’ing notes from the Mac to the iPhone/iPad…
Thanks Gwyneth! I wasn’t aware of that project. Looks interesting for sure, and we’ll consider it as an option to support other sync services.
I notice it doesn’t seem to support the most important service we have, namely iCloud, but I guess it might be viable for other services. Would have to run on iOS and macOS, have an OK license (MIT it seems, which is fine), but certainly worth considering.
There is probably more work to do on the UI end. Can imagine each service has a different authentication protocol, so probably need different UI for each, but still, if rclone could at least simplify the file transfers, it would be great.
Thanks again!
Four years of discussion, and counting. I think there are two threads in here:
It might help to keep this distinction in mind when you decide which audience you want to cater to (first), as there is probably not much overlap.
I’m in that 2nd category, i.e. using WebDAV via Nextcloud for many years now. FWIW, CardDAV and CalDAV are both based on WebDAV - and CalDAV in particular might be quite close to what Agenda needs (2Do can sync over CalDAV, to mention a somewhat related product).
Synchronisation is hard (especially when more than two devices are involved), but not unsolvable (see Version Vectors). As an example, DevonTHINK is able to robustly synchronise over WebDAV on both macOS and i(Pad)OS. It too relies on maintaining a consistent view of its document collection, and dealing with accurate propagation of deletions.
My wish for next December: dear SInterklaas, please take Agenda’s sync capabilities to the next level?
The problem isn’t really sync. We have had sync for years, on iCloud and Dropbox. Problems of syncing multiple devices are already solved in Agenda.
The problem is just the time it takes to support the other APIs of these services, and to make the UI for sign in etc. It’s just a question of resources. It takes weeks, maybe a month, to support one of the services, and it seems wiser to support something a lot more people are demanding, given that sync is already supported via two providers.
WebDAV would certainly be nice to have. We are thinking about it. I suspect the audience for it is small, but it is a group that wants control over their data which is not possible now.
Thanks for the feedback. We will see what we can do.
Im in 1st category where our corporate IT allow us to us only onedrive. Would be helpfull to have that avaliable as option within AGENDA.
Thanks for the feedback. That is useful. We will see what we can do down the track.
+1 for end-to-end encryption as a premium service. If it has to be to a specific cloud service, then iCloud would be my choice.