Re: [coldsync-hackers] Hotsync proxy to coldsync ...

[Andrew Arensburger <arensb+CShackers@ooblick.com>]

On Sat, Nov 03, 2001 at 10:57:28PM -0500, Matthew C. Weigel wrote:
> On Sat, 3 Nov 2001, Johan Van den Brande wrote:
> > Do you know of any GUI projects for coldsync? They all seem to be
> > build arounf pilot-link, but pilot-link is a bit archaic IMHO ...
> 
> I'm planning one for Cocoa/GNUstep.

	Cool! Will you be making screenshots available?

> The coldsync program has a number of features that wouldn't translate
> well to a GUI, such as running from inetd

	True. OTOH, it might be nice if the GUI remained hidden until
you synced.

> (dunno about you but I would
> go *nuts* if someone could send me network traffic and pop up a window

	Okay, maybe not :-)
	Of course, if you deferred opening the window until the client
had authenticated itself as you, presumably it would only happen when
you synced (and were expecting the window).

> As for progress bars and such... for some things that might be possible
> (like installing files), but does DLP tell you beforehand how many
> bytes are going into each db sync, and how many bytes overall?
> Otherwise, it wouldn't be very useful (I note that Palm's software
> doesn't have progress bars, but Palm's software also sucks).

	You do know ahead of time how many databases there are (at
least, as of PalmOS 2.x or so), so that gives you a basis for an
overall progress bar.
	But no, I don't think you can tell ahead of time how big a
database is, nor can you easily estimate how many records might need
to be synced. I guess you might look at the local copy of the database
and assume that the copy on the Palm within an order of magnitude of
that. <shrug>

	You can, of course, do things like display the current sync
phase (install, fetch, sync, dump), the database being synced, the
conduit currently being run, and any status messages the conduit may
have printed. These sorts of things are good, from a UI perspective,
since they tell the user that the program is actually running and
doing something, not just hanging.

-- 
Andrew Arensburger                      This message *does* represent the
arensb@ooblick.com                      views of ooblick.com
	    Nice music here -- my compliments to the clef!
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