Building Blocks

I did some open-source work last week. I created a synchronization option in the Android program called Shuffle. Allowing it to synchronize with the web tool called Tracks.

Here is a description of how to use the synchronization in Shuffle.

Configuration

Open the settings menu, select the Change Synchronization option.

Specify your Tracks installation URL, username and password.

Make sure that the URL is correctly formatted and that there is no ending slash in the url:

this is wrong: http://my.gtdify.com/

this is correct: http://my.gtdify.com

Usage

On the menu available in most screens there is a button called synchronize. Click it and the synchronization starts. It will first synchronize the contexts, then project and last the Tasks.

Details of the synchronization

The synchronization will try to reduce duplicates that might occur between Tracks and Shuffle. This is done by looking that the description of tasks and the names of contexts and projects.

The synchronization works with a server wins, modification date oriented approach. Should there be a conflict the latest version will win, and in it will try to take as much detail it can from Tracks.

Also, using the “Delete completed” option removes the tasks from Shuffle. This means that the synchronizer wont find them and can’t mark them as finished in Tracks. If you use this synchronization I recommend letting the synchronizer take care of the “cleaning up”. This will be done the second synchronization that a task is complete on.

That is, if you complete a task and synchronize, both tasks will be in both systems as completed. Synchronize again the the task will be removed from Shuffle,  but maintained as completed in Tracks.