Re: Gnome Desktop synchronization

[John Carr <john carr unrouted co uk>]

On Thu, Apr 2, 2009 at 3:55 PM, Frank Niedermann <fbn thelogic org> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> I saw that there are many ideas for the Gnome 3.0 Desktop and
> I was wondering, if there are also plans for Desktop synchronization?
>
> Example: User Joe has a Desktop PC at home with Gnome 3.0 He has
> some pictures in his home folder from his digital camera. He taggs some
> of the pictures and has done some editing with gimp.
>
> Next day he is at school/work/somewhere with his laptop. Will he see
> the pictures in his homefolder? Will he see the tags he made on his
> Desktop PC? Will he see gimp as last used application (not yet started
> on the laptop)?
>
> I think that Desktop synchronization gets more and more important
> with the features the desktop gets, like tagging documents. Would
> be very great to have some synchronization with Gnome Desktop,
> like Apple has with the .Mac accounts.
>
> Thanks,
>  Frank
> --

Theres lots of work going on, but i'm not sure what will be ready for GNOME 3.0.

I think the closest GNOME saw to .Mac was http://online.gnome.org, but
i think work on this has slowed in favour of the GNOME Shell work.

John Stowers and friends continue to work on Conduit which is already
an accepted external dependency for GNOME apps wanting to add sync to
their part of the desktop. Work is on going for building "conduits"
between the desktop and both online services like Google and
ScheduleWorld and mobile devices. It should be in good shape for 2.28,
the main blocker is people integrating it - i have some ideas though:

Epiphany integration. Visit a service that Conduit supports - Google,
Facebook, Box.net and in the future anything with SyncML support like
ScheduleWorld - and Epiphany asks you if you would like to set up sync
with that services. At the very least you won't have to put any
details like usernames in apart from password. Maybe if gnome-keyring
is used, even that won't be needed. (Of course, Firefox integration
would be needed for those distros that dont encourage Epiphany).

Bluetooth pairing integration. When you pair a device you tick a sync
checkbox. And paired devices with that flag will be synced to the
configured GNOME PIM application.

(In the future there is no reason why as i user i shouldnt be able to
pick GMail as my default PIM and Conduit would sync phones directly to
that, and tracker would index Gmail directly too).

There is also Wizbit which is still in very early stages but is
concerned with, for desperate want of a better description, all about
your personal cloud, or mist. The end goal is to use DVCS type
technologies to replicate your data between all your devices, with
some emphasis on tracker so that metadata about last used documents
(which implies used applications) and tagging data and all the other
RDF goodness are also everywhere.

John