Re: Proposed module: conduit

[John Stowers <john stowers lists gmail com>]

On Tue, 2008-07-29 at 13:21 +0200, Murray Cumming wrote:
> On Tue, 2008-07-29 at 22:21 +1200, John Stowers wrote:
> > On Tue, 2008-07-29 at 11:24 +0200, Murray Cumming wrote:
> > > How easy is it to do this for any particular specific cases, such as
> > > syncing a Palm with a desktop PC (With Evolution, hopefully), or syncing
> > > the contacts on my mobile phone, or with my N810?
> > 
> > Palm isnt supported.
> > Windows mobile 5/6 support is OK, and getting better.
> > Nokia phone support (via gnome-phone-manager is being worked on ATM)
> > Nokia nxxx support is pretty good.
> [snip]
> 
> I appreciate the difficulty of doing all this, and I like that it's
> being done properly via a proper framework, but it doesn't seem like it
> has enough device support to be genuinely useful to many people yet.

I know everyone likes to think of themselves as a representative user,
and by no means am I dismissing the importance of mobile device sync,
but I personally use online services more these days. The level of
mobile device sync we support well (nxxx and WM5 and iPod) correspond to
the devices I own. GPM integration will likely/hopefully be done this
cycle.

I don't want GNOME to wait forever (again..) for the perfect sync
solution, because in my experience perfect is equivalent to supporting
>= some arbitrary moving threshold combination of devices and
webservices.

The diverse and useful range of things Conduit supports has grown to
support over the last few years have seemed to validate our
architectural choices. This means than any future additions to Conduit,
in terms of devices we support, or bugs we fix, will propogate through
the whole desktop, with no additional work on the part of application
authors.

> 
> > Our strength and historical focus has been sync to online services from
> > GNOME apps. Our current focus is on mobile devices.
> 
> So with what sites can I easily sync my data (from what desktop
> applications)?

The following is a partial list of non-pim sync functionality

== Photos ==
FSpot/eye of gnome/nautilus/folder <-->
 * Flickr
 * Picasa
 * SmugMug
 * ShutterFly
 * Facebook
 * iPod Phots

== Videos ==
totem/nautilus/folder -->
 * Youtube 
 * iPod Video
 * nxxx

== Files ==
* file/folder <--> file/folder
* Box.net
* S3 support (eta: 1 week)
* Google Documents

== Notes ==
Tomboy Notes <-->
* Backpack Notes
* File/Folder

== Misc ==
* RSS feed enclosures
* Desktop settings (GConf)

There is also network sync functionality that allows two PCs to sync
peer to peer any of the above listed data.

I have not gone into the other sync permutations possible, and I am
certain I have left some items out.