[sword-devel] Personal Commentary and Dropbox.

[Nic Carter]

Hi team,

I think I may have mentioned this in the past, but I'm almost ready to go, and so have a few comments/questions about personal commentaries.

Different front-ends do things differently, but there is the Personal Commentary module that we can use for the user to write their own notes to. This is stored as a "normal module", stored in the usual modules location (or, at least, some "usual" location on the local filesystem).
PocketSword currently doesn't support the Personal Commentary module due to the fact that I haven't written any UI by which the user can write to it.

However, once the user can write notes, they must be able to sync. Right now users can have an iPhone and an iPad & have PocketSword on both & ideally any user created content should be sync'd across both.
[In fact, I received yet another user email about this earlier today.]

The next version of PS (almost out of beta) will sync Bible browsing history across devices via iCloud.
For the version following I was planning on adding sync of Bookmarks via iCloud as well.
However, Dropbox have recently released an API for iOS (& Android) for native sync: https://www.dropbox.com/developers/sync
So I am looking into sync of bookmarks via Dropbox instead.
This way I am not limiting a user's data to Apple products only, and sync is possible with other front-ends, if there was any desire for that to happen from other front-end developers.

And this then presents an idea of having user notes/Personal Commentary located on Dropbox. I am not sure how well the SWORD module format would function over a remote filesystem, and so I am putting this thought out there for comments from others.


So, my proposal is for real-time sync of bookmarks & user notes across front-ends via Dropbox.


Thanks heaps, ybic
	nic...  :)






[Aside: Dropbox comes with plenty of space for a free account, so it's no financial burden for users. Anyone on the list who doesn't have it yet (but you all should, cause it's pretty nifty) can sign up for free via http://db.tt/F8p526B and then both you and I get a bonus 500MB of free space. If you feel uncomfortable with me posting this link to this list, please don't use the link and instead sign up the normal free way!]