Re: Online Desktop and GNOME 2.22

["John Stowers" <john stowers lists gmail com>]

>
> [ excellent detailed description omitted ]
>
> What if you don't think of online.gnome.org as a web service; what if
> you think of it like a PDA someone plugged into their USB port?

Excellent!

Apologies if I mis/over-interpret your analogy but this is EXCATLY how
I think about online.gnome.org

Let me explain, because I think we have both build sufficiently large
hammers so now everything looks like a nail. Here goes my nail
story...

Conduit already supports synchronization of many types of data (files,
photos, contacts, calender, settings, notes, text) to many different
kinds of 'PDAs'/$WEBAPPS. In this way I think of online.gnome.org as
JUST ANOTHER 'PDA'[1]  (dataprovider) that we want to support and we
want to support it well.

But at the moment this particular 'PDA' requires a different way for
it to be connected. As I explained earlier, the other 'PDA's we
support are either connected(), disconnected(), or we ask for the user
to connect them (log in) while we wait. I am interested in providing a
consistant way for users to connect their 'PDA's (log in) and I do
this by either using programmatic login (gdata for example), or asking
them to log in using our simple browser login. online.gnome.org doesnt
seem to support either of these scenarios, requiring  a different
connection procedure to everyone else.

I am really interested in thinking about how to integrate sync into
the desktop.

So now its your turn, what if you dont think of conduit as 'just
another sync app' and start to think of it as 'the correct way to sync
things to not just online.gnome.org but to other PDAs'.

Regards

John

[1] If online.gnome.org gets wider acceptance then it might make sense
for it to be the default 'PDA' for certain types of data, but thats a
discussion for another day.

>
> - Owen
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