Re: Gnome Desktop synchronization

[Luis Villa <luis tieguy org>]

On Sat, Apr 4, 2009 at 9:17 AM, John Carr <john carr unrouted co uk> wrote:
> 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.

That is a pretty interesting list. Someone should write a GNOME
Journal length piece about all that, how far along it all is, and how
(whether?) it all fits together.

Luis