Re: Syncing photos

["David A. Desrosiers" <desrod gnu-designs com>]

> A blanket ban won't be hard to do at all, and we can implement 
> converters for other formats as we think of them.

That's not as easy as you might think... not without any documentation 
on the file formats used by these proprietary application vendors, and 
not when these vendors threaten to sue if you release a FLOSS tool 
that can read/deconstruct/reconstruct their proprietary data format.

I ran into this with Kodak several years ago at Palmsource, and one of 
their representatives directly threatened me in front of about 15 
bystanders, when I asked if they wanted to collaborate on writing a 
conduit in pilot-link to extract their images from their image 
database.

> This is definitely something that should be implemented because 
> compiling par and using it are not something newbies want to do. It 
> also doesn't take much new code, so it won't take long.

Every format is completely unique, and every version tends to be just 
as unique. Photos v1.0 is different from Photos v2.0 for example, and 
Photos v1.0 on a Sony device is not the same as Photos v1.0 on a Palm 
device.

It gets complicated when you have to rewrite complete conduit logic 
from scratch, after reverse-engineering every byte-on-the-wire for 
each app and each version.


--
David A. Desrosiers
desrod gnu-designs com
http://projects.plkr.org/