tomdroid-dev team mailing list archive

[Benoit Garret <benoit.garret_launchpad@xxxxxxxx>]

Hi everyone,

A few people have expressed a desire to contribute to the web-sync
part of Tomdroid. I'm currently the only one, as far as I know, who
did any work on that part.

To speed up the whole process, I'm listing the areas that can be
improved with the hope that someone will be interested and help. I'm
not saying that I will stop working on this, but it will be far more
enjoyable and faster with some help.

The current tasks are up for grabs:

 * Interface: the current code doesn't provide many cues about what's
happening behind the scenes and may confuse the user. It could use
some work in order to be able to tell the user about the state of the
authentication/sync. It could be divided in two subtasks. The first
one is the design of the interface with its flow. I don't think it is
a good idea to rush blindly without a bit of prior planning, it
requires some thought. The second one is some code refactoring to be
able to extract useful information about the running sync process
(http download progress, etc).

 * Background sync: Tomboy recently added the support for this, and
I'm jealous. Background syncing in itself is not very difficult to
implement but good integration with the global Android ecosystem
requires some attention to detail (eg. detecting if the network is up
or if the user has disabled the data synchronization settings).

 * The core synchronization code: the work I've done only works in the
case of a one-way synchronization. Olivier is working on note editing,
which will break the current synchronization code. I'd rather plan
this ahead than have to remove the sync feature. The current Tomboy
code can be used as an example, it shouldn't be difficult to implement
but some changes to the database schema will be needed.

These descriptions are very rough, I don't expect anyone to know
exactly what needs to be done and instantly jump in. If any brave soul
wants to help and stake their claim to fame, they're welcome to reply
on or off-list where I can explain more precisely what needs to be
done and give a few pointers to get them started. I can also help with
the setup of a development environment if you've never done any
Android development or never used Launchpad and bazaar.

Hope to talk to you all soon ;-)

Cheers,
Benoît