On Tue, Apr 29, 2008 at 04:39:31PM +0100, Graham Cobb wrote:
> On Tuesday 29 April 2008 15:18:01 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> > On Mon, Apr 28, 2008 at 08:40:30PM -0400, Gary Baribault wrote:
> > > I kind of wish that someone would start up an oposing PIM .. Any takers?
> > > 450$ to play Mahjong or Blocks seems a little steep!
> 
> I didn't start working on GPE because I thought it was a great project: I 
> started working on GPE because I had a need for a PIM on the Internet Tablet 
> and it seemed more sensible to start with an existing piece of software and 
> make improvements rather than create something from scratch.  
> 
> It doesn't seem likely to me that starting an opposing PIM would help.  There 
> are few enough people to work on one -- what would be achieved by trying to 
> work on two?  All of people's pet peeves with GPE (bugs, UI, features) could 
> be fixed if there were one or two more developers with time to make a 
> contribution.

I'm happy with the calendar, now that I've discovered the trick to using 
it -- make sure that "My calendar" is selected in the upper right 
corner.

It's the to-do list that gets me.  I come from a Palm environment.  No, 
the to-do list there was also useless.  What I found to work was the 
memo system.  Each memo was a to-do list item, and it would neatly 
display the first lines of all the to-do items.  What I could do there 
that I can't do with GPE or Palm's own to-do list was rearrange the 
order of items on the screen, just by dragging them around.  Once a week 
I'd look at the entire set and rearrange them, so that the ones I wanted 
to be particularly concerned with that week would be near the top of the 
list.  Setting numerical priorities just doesn't work as conveniently.

What I do like about GPE is that it doesn't have a limit on the number 
of categories available (at least, not one I've encountered; I was 
always bumping against the 16-category limit on Palm).

As far as I know, GPE stores its to-do list in a data base, which is (at 
least conceptually) an unordered set of records.  The kind of 
hand-rearranging I do is not really conceptually compatible with this.

> 
> > I've certainly considered it -- but first I want to put together a sync
> > mechanism that
> >   * doesn't care how many places you sync with,
> >   * doesn't care whether the places sync amongst each other.
> >   * provides syntactic guarantees about merged updates.
> > Such a sync mechanism I need for more things than an improved PIM.
> 
> Sync mechanisms are also something that seems to become much more complex 
> than 
> one expects when one starts.  I would encourage you to contribute to 
> improving OpenSync if possible, rather than start yet another project.  If 
> nothing else, there are people on the OpenSync list who have tackled many of 
> these problems and who may have useful advice.  It is another project where a 
> usable product is in sight but there are not enough developer-hours to get 
> there at the speed we would wish.

For just the todo-list and sync, I could probably improvise with a 
(possibly modified) text editor and a distrubited revision-control 
system like monotone. But none of these systems, as far as I know, merge 
changes very well when they involve reordering things.  Moving blocks of 
data tend to be treated as deletion and insertion.

But I agree.  Devising a complete sync mechanism just for a to-do list 
is overkill.

-- hendrik

> 
> Graham
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