We got a couple of mails from people asking us, what exactly fruux is about. I guess our marketing sucks

What is fruux about?

• syncing data (currently addressbooks) between multiple macs devices

What about the future?

• sync even more data (calendars, bookmarks, preferences)
• iPhone syncing
• adding social-syncing
• more details in our roadmap

Any demo video?

• Thanks to Joshua from MacGasm there is a nice screencast covering fruux. It’s availiable at blip.tv.
  (The video shows an older version of fruux. If you watched the video and wonder what went wrong at about 1:20 - Address Book.app and the Apple SyncServices only update a record, if it is not currently opened. Joshua worked around by closing Address Book.app and syncing again. Just clicking on another contact and then back on the “demo contact” would have worked, too. The sync actually went fine, Address Book.app just didn’t update itself with the new data, because the changed contact was currently opened. In “real live” you probably won’t even recognize this behaviour of Address Book.app and Apples SyncServices, because you won’t sit on both machines, have the same contact opened and wait for the change to appear)

FAQ

• Is my data safe?
  • fruux uses industry standard SSL encryption (like your bank does for your homebanking) and we will never ever give a third party access to your data!
• Should I backup my addressbook before I start using fruux?
  • You should even backup your addressbook when your are not using fruux! fruux is betasoftware. We store a quadrillion (not exactly) contacts and so far nothing went wrong, but there might always be some edge case (for example if you use any other third party sync app) where bad things could happen. So please backup your addressbook (Launch Address Book.app -> File -> Export -> Save Address Book Archive).
• fruux is free, may I support you?
  • Why not. You could donate via Paypal, or just shop at Amazon.com or Amazon.de. It’s also possible to list your website/company on our supporters page. We might also blog about your company and how nice your donation was.
  • Help spreading the word. Blog about fruux, produce screencasts, upload screenshots (if your article/video/… is nice, we’ll probably link it here), tell your friends, show others that you use fruux at iusethis.com, if you are a Facebook user please “fan” our fruux @ facebook page, follow us on Twitter (it’s low volume, usually we just use it for important stuff) and so on.

More questions?

• Contact us

Try fruux?

• It’s availiable as a free download

It’s been a while since our last post, but it was worth the wait. This screencast shows the first demo of our sync client including a graphical user interface. The video shows the following steps:

• empty database on the fruuxServer
• the content of the local addressbook
• installing and running the client
• fruuxServer database in sync with local addressbook
• changing a name in the local addressbook
• syncing again
• fruuxServer database in sync again

Just some comments:

• yes the gui isn’t very pretty yet and we have to add our logo
• the screencast shows just first- and lastname in the database of the fruuxServer, but of course all other entities have been synced as well. the system is able to handle all the custom entities!
• there is no public betatesting yet, but hopefully soon

Looking forward for your comments.

This screencast shows a very early version of our sync client. So far there’s no graphical user interface. We just wanted to share this video with you as a little non-vaporware proof.

What actually happens in the video is the following:

• the client uploads the local addressbook to the server
• the local addressbook is deleted
• the client runs again and fetches all the previously uploaded records from the server

Even in this early version we already support every entity of the addressbook, including the custom entities.

Just in case you wonder, why the client fetches all the records from the server during the second run instead of deleting them on the server as well (this is what would happen in a real sync): we cheated a bit. the second time the sync-client is invoked, it gets a special parameter that forces the client to rebuild the addressbook with the data stored on the server.