Selective syncing sneak preview
One feature that is constantly requested is (what we call) “selective syncing”. This feature will allow you to selectivly sync your data classes. You might want to keep your contacts and calendars in sync between your Mac at work and your Mac at home, but eventually you’d like to have individual bookmarks on both machines. Currently (v0.9.4) it’s not possible to select the data classes that get synced – it’s “all or nothing”.
Selective syncing is actively in development and will (hopefully soon) give you a much more individual syncing setup. Additionally it allows us to implement new “niche features” (like preferences and keychain syncing) on top of selective syncing.
(Preference syncing is not necessarily included in our next release, the screenshot is from our internal development version)
Tags: addressbook, bookmarks, calendars, contacts, demo, gui, ical, preferences, preview, safari, selective syncing, sneak, tasks
March 19th, 2009 at 10:13 am
Wow, that sounds great. I’m really looking forward to this feature.
Thank you
March 19th, 2009 at 9:50 pm
Yeah this is great !
Can wait for this one :p
March 31st, 2009 at 7:14 pm
OK, that’s really cool. I do wholesale syncing anyway, but can easily imagine scenarios where selective syncing comes up handy.
I do however have a question regarding calendar syncing. You’re the syncing specialists, so it only seems reasonable to ask you.
In my iCal I do have two ‘local” calendars – Business and, ehm… frankly “Calendar”. I keep my business appointments in the “Business” one (seems I’m getting too obvious) and private in the second one. On a single computer I also subscribed using iCal.app to my two Google Calendars (named, you guessed it, “GBusiness” and “GCalendar”). Now, while syncing my “local” calendars between computers, everything works as intended, but the subscribed calendars do not get into the sync session at all.
Is this by design of iSync framework?
I suppose so – since the GCal appointments do not get synced with my phone as well (everything stored locally on each of my Macs does, calendars, contacts), but I’d love a definitive answer.
I can easily solve the problem by subscribing to Google Calendars on both computers, but since the subscriptions do not get synced, I cannot get them to my 100% iSync-capable phone anyway. So I thought of a solution like this: let’s add subscription-capability to fruux itself. It would download the subscriptions from GCal, put the individual events into respective calendars, so the iSync framework would treat them as “local” calendars – and allow the ‘recycled remote calendars’ to be distributed to other computers in the regular fruux way.
The point is to spread the data to all services (like GCal) and computers (fruux-equipped Macs) from a single master calendar, which is created by combining all available calendars (both Mac-based and web-based). This would guarantee consistency across all the copies.
So, an executive summary follows:
Let’s power up fruux with a subscription engine, which converts events (or maybe even the contacts too?) to a form that is capable of being synced.
May 18th, 2009 at 5:27 pm
You can connect ical via caldav with google calendar.
http://www.google.com/support/calendar/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=99358#ical
You can connect Google Calendar to your mobile via Goosync.
http://www.goosync.com/
How´s that?
I would LOVE a Funambol Integration with fruux!!!!
This way it would be possible to sync Calendars, Adresses, Notes, Bookmarks via SyncML…
June 16th, 2009 at 11:16 am
I just read a really good explanation of what makes a *successful* sync on the Apple Dev Connection website (Apple’s official resource repository for OS X app developers)
I posted a PDF copy viewable on a.nnotate.com and it has a ridiculously long URL so here’s the short link
http://tr.im/AppleSync
Sync is really a very delicate process that is easily broken – there’s a diagram in the PDF that illustrates the core concepts of sync very clearly and accurately – if you’ve ever been frustrated or surprised or mad with a sync that’s gone awry and you can’t understand why your data is gone, duplicated, or garbled, this document is good knowledge source.
Seriously, share it with everyone you know who syncs because as a rule it seems most people demand the impossible in a sync function, not because they are unreasonable, but because they don’t know how it works.
June 16th, 2009 at 11:25 am
@Tommy_B:
And probably it’s not really suitable for the average user. I am not even sure if it is okay to publish this document. It might be under Apples NDA
I am quite sure that the fruux guys know this document – otherwise they probably wouldn’t develop any sync application
July 10th, 2009 at 1:01 am
@josh, where did you ever come up with the asinine idea that I was giving my dear friends at fruux a lesson in app development? how ridiculous that would be if someone came in here and did that… so ridiculous, that it renders the suggestion that someone doing that absolutely absurd
if you look at the content of the posts before mine, some were asking about sync functionality, I shared a reference with anyone who came to this thread who was interested in reading it so they could understand how sync works. It’s totally suitable for the average user of fruux… did you even bother to read it? And you’re too funny conjecturing about NDA’s… I am quite sure that a member of the Apple Developers Connection knows about NDA’s – otherwise they wouldn’t be posting material that isn’t covered under an NDA to the public.
Sometimes it’s better if people think you’re stupid to keep one’s mouth shut than to open it and remove all doubt.
July 29th, 2009 at 11:25 pm
You should think about how users can DELETE items from your cloud. Once sync’d, our data is “yours.” There’s no way to delete or recover our data from your cloud. (We can “revert” by replacing one dataset with another, but we can’t delete.)
July 30th, 2009 at 2:28 pm
Your blog is a little outdated… Any updates?
July 30th, 2009 at 2:41 pm
@Ralph:
Deleting your data is no problem, just contact us: http://fruux.com/contact/
Just wiping the data in your account without replacing it with new data would be synced to your client, too.
So if we’d simply wipe the data in your account the next sync would wipe the data on your Mac, too.
But a function to unregister your account will be implemented in a later version of fruux. Currently you have to write us a short email and we’ll delete your account.
@123:
Currently we prefer coding instead of writing lengthy blog posts
But you are right – we haven’t updated this blog in a while.
In the meantime you might want to check out http://www.facebook.com/fruux
September 10th, 2009 at 4:50 pm
Hi,
Very usefull tools, i use it to work,
but …. have you planned to make a blackberry app to sync blackberry with fruux,
with this app for BB, fruux would be wonderfull.
good job
Xav
September 19th, 2009 at 3:10 pm
xavierf: I think Fruux should not build apps like that for every phone. For Blackberry you should have a look at: http://www.9to5mac.com/blackberry-desktop-client