Re: [O] Some thoughts on MobileOrg and its development ....

[Henning Weiss]

Hi,

My name is Henning and I am the co-maintainer of MobileOrg Android.

The reason I stopped working on the project is partially the lack of time, but also because I didn't believe in the design of org-mobile-push/pull and edit nodes. Almost half of the bugs on our issue tracker are with regards to synchronization. Our mailing list is also full with questions about how to set synchronization up. This is the reason I tried to come up with a better design based on git synchronization. And I did ;)

I have been working over the last couple of months on a private prototype. I'm currently using it in my daily life and it works for me. It uses Git (and only Git) for synchronization and doesn't use org-mobile at all. The idea is that you keep all org files under git version control. Synchronization of all "clients" (apps or Emacs) is done against that repository. It is also possible to configure whether to use "ours" or "theirs" merge strategy when conflicts occur. I have focused on designing an app I can trust.

It already has an outline view like MobileOrg, an agenda view, you can add and edit nodes, synchronize changes with a remote repository and synchronize scheduled entries to the calendar. I ported some of my code from MobileOrg, but a lot of it is written from scratch.

I don't feel comfortable publishing it for general consumption yet. There are still some rough edges for the end user, but the core functionality is done and it works reliably. If you want to help development and testing, feel free to contact me :)

Henning

On Thu, Aug 14, 2014 at 12:17 PM, Jacek Generowicz <address@hidden> wrote:

Sean Escriva <address@hidden> writes:

>>> https://cordova.apache.org/

>>    http://kivy.org

> From the little experience I have with them, cross platform frameworks
> do suffer from a loss of fidelity compared to native applications but
> as mentioned that may be an acceptable trade off.

We are talking about interfacing to org-mode, an Emacs mode: I don't
think that the target audience is one which excessively values
platform-specific look-and-feel and has an insurmountable aversion to
idiosyncratic interfaces :-)

> There's tons of options for possible paths here

Do you have a decent resource for seeking them out? I found good ones
surprisingly difficult to find.

> (even https://wukix.com/mocl for fellow LISPers) but the key in my
> mind is to support a community of contributors.

Yes, I almost mentioned Mocl along with Kivy, but two things stopped me:

  + Mocl is not free, which will not help increase the number of
    contributors,

  + I get the feeling that the average org-mode user is even less Lispy
    than your average Emacs user, Elisp notwithstanding.

>>> Unfortunately, due to other existing commitments, i wouldn't be able
>>> to take point on such a reboot.
>>
>> The dreamer in me thinks this might be the itch-to-scratch that finally
>> motivates me to getting to grips with Kivy; the realist in me is pretty
>> certain that I fall into the same category as you.
>
> Realistically this is the issue in most cases, plenty of well meaning
> help but not a lot of time to do anything. Life gets in the way.

For me, after life getting in the way, by far the biggest barrier to
contribution is the platform-specificity of the projects: I simply can't
be bothered to even think about contributing to something which only be
useful to "half" the potential users.