How sync Tap Forms Mac with dropbox

[Mario Cudde]

Hi,

I have seen on the sell page, dropbox sync feature, but I haven’t seen this feature in the app.

We use TF for our inventory material and it would be great to sync this app between my colegue and myself with another sync services of iCloud that is more personnal.

Thank you for your help.

Greetings.

[Brendan]

Hi Mario,

The marketing page doesn’t say that Tap Forms syncs with Dropbox, it says “Built-in support for file transfers between your iPhone or iPad and your Dropbox account.” Which means that Tap Forms uses Dropbox for simple file transfers. It does not use it to sync the database. iCloud is required for that, which means that each device in the sync pool must be logged into the same iCloud account.

Sorry for the confusion.

Thanks,

Brendan

[Mario Cudde]

Hi Brendan,

Thank you for your reply.

Is there another way to sync, other than iCloud ?

Greetings.

[Brendan]

Hi Mario,

Not really. You can beam a single record from one device to another and it will merge the changes with the destination device, but that’s more for just a one-off. Not a true sync solution.

Thanks,

Brendan

[Mario Cudde]

Hi Brendan,

Will you provide this feature in a future release ?

Greetings.

[Brendan]

Hi Mario,

Anything is possible, but I can’t guarantee it although I know there’s demand for it so it’s something I’ll most likely do. I just can’t say when.

Thanks,

Brendan

[Tola Brennan]

Hi Brendan,

I love the app but it goes from five stars to one star based on the sync issue (just from a lot of frustration). I probably got it at a bad time (about a week ago) since there’s a lot of trouble with the Yosemite thing. I’ve been resetting iCloud sync constantly and logging in and out of iCloud as per the support thread. It seems to eventually catch up but ten minutes of sync hell everyday is pretty annoying. I know this is an Apple issue but I would really like to hear at least some tentative timeline for Dropbox sync. I totally get that independent development is tough but I can’t help but think about how seamless something like Day One is at pushing changes (and a great app as well for way less money).

Thanks,
Tola

[Brendan]

Hi Tola,

Thanks for your feedback. I understand that sync can be frustrating when it doesn’t work right. If Tap Forms were as simple an app as Day One, sync would be way easier for me to implement too. Also, yes, Day One is cheaper, but does it do everything that Tap Forms does? How can you possibly compare? I just released Tap Forms Mac 3.0 as a free upgrade. People who have purchased Tap Forms in 2008 are still receiving free upgrades today. How’s that for value for your money?

I can’t really comment on timelines for unimplemented features. Sorry. As I mentioned before, it’s something that I’d like to do for a future update. Just don’t know when that future update will be. Maybe the next one, maybe 10 updates down the line. All I can guarantee is that my next update won’t cost you a penny.

Thanks,

Brendan

[David Butenhof]

I can’t help but think about how seamless something like Day One is at pushing changes (and a great app as well for way less money).

Day One synchronizes complete documents, which is the “simple mode” of iCloud synchronization. Furthermore, I’ve been using Day One for years, both with iCloud and Dropbox, and I’ve often had problems where one side or the other stops picking up changes until something is reset. Synchronization is complicated and there are a lot of things that can go wrong.

TapForms is vastly more complicated. It’s a database, trying to synchronize individual bits of data that are mingled together. It can’t just copy files back and forth depending on which was more recently modified; and changing code to switch from one synchronization model to another is therefore vastly more complicated.

[Brendan]

Thanks for your comments David. Yes, it is very complex to synchronize the data in Tap Forms. Infinitely more complicated than an app like DayOne or a vast number of other “fixed structure” apps.

I’ve looked at the Dropbox Sync API to see how hard it would be to implement that into Tap Forms and it’s quite a bit of a nightmare to implement. Currently Tap Forms uses standard operating system calls to read and write every file. With Dropbox, you have to use the Dropbox Sync API to read and write every single file. And it’s not a very straight forward API. So it’s a really big job to add Dropbox sync to Tap Forms. I definitely want to provide support for it. I had just hoped that the Dropbox Sync system would be smart enough to just sync the files I create and store in folders rather than me having to rewrite all my code to read and write files using specific Dropbox Sync commands.

Thanks,

Brendan

[Tola Brennan]

Hi Brendan,

Thanks for the quick reply and the most recent comment gives me a much better sense of the challenges. I’m a pretty literate app user but I’m definitely not a developer so there are issues I just wouldn’t know to think about. I just want to reiterate that I think Tap Forms is great and the flexibility makes it totally worthwhile. The frustration was more from having an almost flawless experience and finding one little thing not working great than a criticism of the value of the app. If there are any more sync issues, it feels much better being able to curtail that frustration by recognizing how hard it is to get these things to work properly.

Best,
Tola

[Brendan]

Hi Tola,

I appreciate the criticism still. It helps me to build a better product. It actually really bothers me when there’s something wrong with Tap Forms or knowing that I can do better to make some aspect of it a better experience for my current and future customers. It is very difficult work though, but also very rewarding for me.

Thanks!

Brendan

[Michelle Boulton]

I have been storing my Bento database on Dropbox and directing my various devices to that shared database. Could I do something similar with TapForms?

Michelle

[Brendan]

Hi Michelle,

Bento is not a sandboxed app, so I guess it worked for them. But in Tap Forms there are security issues due to it running as a sandboxed app (which is a requirement for selling on the Mac App Store). However, if you’re good with Unix, you may be able to create a soft-link to the TapForms_db.sqlite file in your Dropbox account. However, I wouldn’t really recommend it and I have not tried it.

I am working on a proper Dropbox sync implementation though as an alternative to iCloud sync.

Thanks,

Brendan

[Author]

Posts