Hi Lisa, Your argument against putting much energy into peer to peer sync with mobile devices is pretty convincing. It would take a huge amount of work to have OSAF support multiple devices on multiple platforms in a polished way, and the return on investment wouldn't be good, because the devices would be outdated by the time we finished polishing.
I was almost ready to say, OK, I'll just wait 1-5 years until I have a device that does CalDAV over a cellular data connection, until then my Chandler sync urges will have to be plowed into something else. But on reflection, I wonder if this might be a place where a little effort might go a long way. Could there be a middle path between no device sync and committing to a professional vision of sync? What if we put a modest amount of staff time into: A) Leveraging our existing sharing framework to provide a basic UI for syncing calendars to mobile devices, ending in stubs with solid APIs for processing inbound and outbound sync operations B) Documenting how those stubs could be built out with non-OSAF parcels on specific platforms for specific devices The idea would be to have the UI already set up to choose a preferred device, a preferred collection to sync to, whether recurrence is supported, whether timezones are supported, whether the sync should be inbound, outbound, or both, and what to do with conflicts. Authors of specific device/platform parcels would then only have to define a set of capabilities and implement the transport. I think doing this much would go a long way towards encouraging lots of people who want minimal export-to-device functionality to write something that could be shared. In general, I think there's a lot of value for an open source project in creating stubs and documenting an API in cases like this. It makes for a much smaller bite to help out with the project, and I think this is exactly the kind of itch developers like to scratch for themselves if the bar is low enough. I know I really want this, if we had the UI and APIs in place already, I'd write the export code for my phone on some weekend, now that I've figured out how to manipulate the calendar over Bluetooth. OK, maybe I'll just go ahead and write the whole thing on a weekend, but I'm not making that promise. :) For myself, creating events manually on my phone is enough of a pain that I'd happily accept just export functionality, I don't need full bidirectional sync. Sincerely, Jeffrey _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Open Source Applications Foundation "Dev" mailing list http://lists.osafoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/dev
