moving data from iPhone to Mac

[Steve Morris]

I am a long time Tap Forms user on the iPhone.I just bought the Mac version and I would liketo copy data, Actually I want the data to sync automatically but the doc says it will not sync unless the data is already on both devices. That is bizarre but it is what is so now I’m trying to do a manual sync, i.e. copy the dat base manually.

Problem 1:

1 In the cloudant sync doc . it says: “On iOS, tap on the share button at the top of the main Documents view and select “Send Document”.

2) Can’t do that! There is no “Send Document” to select on the share menu. To move on I copied the data to Dropbox.

3) The doc doesn’t say what the matching Mac operation should be. Guessing I tried open and import.

Open won’t let me select the .tfarc file. It is greyed out. Import is worse. All import options are greyed out.

So the questions are:
* What file type will open one if it is nor tfarc? It isn’t csv. because there is also a .csv file in the same directory.
* What state am I in that import is disabled? (Options greyed out.)

[Brendan]

Hi Steve,

What you want to do is first close the currently opened document on your iOS device. Then you’ll see the action menu button there. Tap on it and you’ll see the Send Document function. Use that to send the document to your Mac.

But, if you decide to use iCloud for syncing, then Tap Forms will automatically put a placeholder document onto the Mac version when you enable sync on that document on the iOS version. When you open that placeholder document, Tap Forms Mac will start to download the data to it after a few moments.

So maybe give that a try to see if that works for you.

Thanks for purchasing the Mac version!

Brendan

[Brendan]

Also, when you send a document from the iOS version to the Mac version, the document will land in the Downloads folder. You will probably want to add it to the main Tap Forms Database Documents window. You can do that by dragging it into that view. When you see the blue horizontal line appear when you drag the file into the documents list, let go. Tap Forms will move the file to the right place then.

[Steve Morris]

I tried to post a reply over 10 minutes ago but I don’t see it when I reload this page. Is this normal? I know something happened because when I tried to post again it rejected it as a duplicate.

[Steve Morris]

Hmm. That posted. Trying the original reply again. Apologies if this ends up as a duplicate.

You wrote: “What you want to do is first close the currently opened document on your iOS device.”

1) I try “Save to dropbox. but it doesn’t let me.”Can’t upload file. Sorry, uploading this file type to Dropbox is currently not supported.”

2) I try my email client ‘gmail’. This looks better.The operation completes and reports success. However when I save it from gmail on the Mac it doesn’t look good:
[code]% ls -l HealthStuff.tapforms
-rw-r–r–@ 1 smorris staff 0 Oct 24 10:06 HealthStuff.tapforms
%
[/code]
When I try to open in Tap Forms I get a dialog containing:
[code]Error opening database file
The file “HealthStuff.tapforms” couldn’t be saved in the folder “BloodEtc”.
[/code]
Note: BloodEtc is the folder where I put tap forms stuff.

So stumped on this path I decided to try iCloud. (My eventual goal is to use my own cloudDB server running on my hardware but I need to start somewhere.) I wish you included either more detail or a pointer to doc on how to do this on iOS. You did say:

“But, if you decide to use iCloud for syncing, then Tap Forms will automatically put a placeholder document onto the Mac version when you enable sync on that document on the iOS version.”

[code]
1) Enable iCloud sync in the iOS tools menu.’

“automatically put a placeholder document onto the Mac version”

2) On the Mac try to ‘open’ the placeholder. Can’t find anything that looks like a ‘placeholder’. “Mac version” of what? iCloud drive? Since apple has arbitrarily decided that my Documents folder now lives on the iCloud drive I have a lot of stuff there. I need a hint about where to look.
[/code]

[Steve Morris]

Now I remember. I tried to edit the post to fix the code tags and when I submitted the edit the post went away. I thought I remembered a preview function to review things like tags? I don’t see one. Is that a problem with my browser? Maybe I’m thinking of a different forum.

So consider this is tentatively two bugs reported against the forum software. No preview and edits seem to fail.

[Brendan]

Hi Steve,

I think your post got caught up in my ASKIMET anti-spam plug-in. I see a bunch of them in the spam folder in my WordPress admin account.

You wrote: “What you want to do is first close the currently opened document on your iOS device.”

1) I try “Save to dropbox. but it doesn’t let me.”Can’t upload file. Sorry, uploading this file type to Dropbox is currently not supported.”

I’m not sure these two things are related. I was trying to tell you how to send a document from your iOS device to your Mac using the built-in Send Document function in Tap Forms. That doesn’t use Dropbox. It uses Apple’s AirDrop function.

The steps are as follows:

1. Close document by tapping the close button at the top-left of the My Forms tab. There’s also one on the other tabs too.
2. Tap the action menu button on the main Documents screen (that’s the screen that has the grid of document icons). The action menu is the square button with the up arrow pointing out of it.
3. Tap on the Send Document function.
4. Tap on a file to send.
5. You should see the devices listed there that are turned on.
6. Tap on your Mac.
7. Wait for it to be sent to your Mac.

2) On the Mac try to ‘open’ the placeholder. Can’t find anything that looks like a ‘placeholder’. “Mac version” of what? iCloud drive? Since apple has arbitrarily decided that my Documents folder now lives on the iCloud drive I have a lot of stuff there. I need a hint about where to look.

The placeholder document is just a regular Tap Forms document that has a little cloud icon in it. Inside the cloud icon is a down arrow. It signifies that the document is in the cloud, but has not yet downloaded its data to Tap Forms. Tapping on that (or double-clicking on it in Tap Forms Mac) will open it up and then begin to sync.

There’s a video that shows this process here:

https://vimeo.com/channels/tapformsmac5/page:1

It’s the very first “What’s New in Tap Forms 5.1” video.

Thanks,

Brendan

[Steve Morris]

After a little fiddling I am now working. Thanks. I didn’t even know there were videos so thanks for the pointer. I had stumbled on the forms layout and switched to column view but didn’t notice the column width control. Adjustable width makes a good feature even better. Thanks for that feature.

The first thing I did when my document appeared on the mac is delete all my bogus searches. If deleting searches is supported on ios I never found it. Instead I renamed the bogus ones so they showed up at the end of the list. It was nice to finally make them go away.

Note: The apple magic terminology for sending wirelessly between devices is “share with airdrop.” You will notice that those are the words that appear above the device icon in the share menu that you wanted me to use. The Send Documents menu has a plethora of choices for sending documents including via Dropbox and email. Airdrop is just one of many. If you don’t explicitly say airdrop many users will not know which you mean and most will assume that all the share options will work because that is the behavior for most apps. I just started going through the methods I know starting with Dropbox. Unfortunately I stopped before I got to airdrop.

Note2: I know Apple has a history of changing these things around but the activity icon is most frequently called the share icon, especially by Apple. Both are officially correct. Activity was the original name (actually upload was the original original name) and Apple lists both names but ‘share’ is more common and I expect ‘activity’ will eventually disappear as a name for the icon. I think you would be less likely to confuse your users if you called it the share icon as well. Hopefully Apple will stop renaming it.

Anyway thanks for the help. Learning the Mac app should be easier because there is a manual. That will probably help me with the iPhone app as well. As for sync I will try switching to IBM next and when that works switch to my own cloudDB server. One step at a time. I have been using MongoDB for other personal apps but may switch them to cloudDB as well so I only need to support one nosql database.

[Brendan]

Oops. You’re right. I forgot about all of those other options that are available when the share sheet comes up. I tried to hide them all except for AirDrop but there wasn’t an option to do that. Sorry for my misunderstanding of what you were doing.

The “action menu” is what I’ve been calling that button since Tap Forms 1.0. That’s what I get when I call this method:

UIBarButtonItem *actionItem = [[UIBarButtonItem alloc] initWithBarButtonSystemItem:UIBarButtonSystemItemAction target:self action:@selector(actionButtonClicked:)];

So it’s the Action button that I’m asking for. They just repurposed that to be the Share menu at some point.

The tricky part is, what do I put there instead that implies “perform some action”? I don’t want to tell customers, “tap the Share button in order to delete all the records in your form”. I wish there was a better globally accepted button that means “display a menu of commands that can be performed whether they be sharing something or performing a function.”

[Steve Morris]

I don’t think Apple has an icon for that but I’ve seen a couple of possibilities in various apps. You probably know these already.

1) … elipsis which Apple calls “More Options”. It is not exactly right for this but it is vague enough to work in a variety of use cases. I’ve never found two apps that use it the same way. Apps pretty much gets to define what the ‘options’ are and they are tasks in some apps.

2) Many apps put additional actions under the settings ‘gear’ icon, probably because they can’t think of where else to put them. In fact one app I just looked at has no settings or preferences in the settings menu. Only actions.

3) Wrench. This is not standard but I think it is closest to what you want of all I have seen. Apple doesn’t provide a standard wrench it so each app that uses it has a different version of the icon. Phythonista uses a wrench in the python IDE/editor that pops up a set of useful tools. One of them is the share icon.I think wrench universally means ‘tools’ or ‘things that can be done.’ It is annoying Apple doesn’t adopt it because I think it is the best choice.

4) Some apps use their own icon or one of the above but add text annotation to reduce ambiguity. In fact almost half of then annotate icons with tiny but readable text. It looks nice.

5) Some apps use the share icon but add their tasks to the apple share menu so there is only one menu. For example a photo manager app puts ‘move’ (move photo to different album) and a couple of other image actions in the Apple share menu.

Just some thoughts. As you say there is clearly no standard. Personally I’d use the wrench for action plus I would add text labels to any icon that is not absolutely standard and obvious. As I flipped through all these apps the ones with text annotation below icons seemed clearer.

[Brendan]

There’s not much room in a navigation bar on iOS to put a label beneath the icon though. There is on the tab bar at the bottom, but not generally in the navigation bar at the top.

I’ve thought about a gear icon, but those to me are settings and not actions.

I use the gear button for the Tools icon on the tab bar. The things on the Tools screen are both settings and functions.

Yes, I wish Apple would standardize on some better icons for this purpose.

I think I have too many things in some spots to be able to put all my functions on the Apple share sheet. Besides, it would seem weird to tap the Share button to view Apple’s Share sheet, then to tap on a button that says “View Settings” or “Customize Form”, etc.

[Steve Morris]

I agree. I was not suggesting any of them except the wrench. I was mere listing what I found other apps doing after a review of some of my favorite apps. I noticed that to make room for text some of the apps used smaller icons. I was surprised by the variety of solutions but that is obviously because Apple does not provide guidance in this area so developers are forced to do what they think is best. And we know if you put three developers in a room at least 5 unique solutions will come out.

Another possibility I’ve seen but forgot to include might be better than the wrench. Many apps use the icon with three horizontal bars ☰ (hamburger icon) to invoke a slide menu that partially covers the page. The icon is supposed to be a stylized representation of a shrunken menu, click it to get the full menu. I think this is more of a Google thing than an apple thing. Most google apps use it but so does Facebook, Firefox, Twitter, Time Magazine and Starbucks. The hamburger icon is quite venerable since it predates the Macintosh. It was originally used in the Xerox Star that inspired Steve Jobs to create the Macintosh. I changed my mind. I’m no longer in favor of the wrench. I vote for the hamburger.

[Brendan]

Another option is sort of a compromise between the hamburger menu and a settings menu icon. If you launch the Stocks app, you’ll see a menu that looks a bit like the Pick List button in Tap Forms. The Pick List button in Tap Forms has a checkmark in the top dot’s spot on that button, so it would be a wee bit different than this menu button. But maybe that’s a good alternative.

But I also wonder what people will think if that button suddenly changes everywhere in Tap Forms? I’ve used the same “action” menu button since 2008! :)

[Steve Morris]

Apple was to one that changed the meaning of the icon. I don’t think people will be surprised if you follow the Apple change. Personally I’m surprised that you haven’t changed it already since the ‘new’ share extension functionality in ios has been standard for quite a while. It was introduced in ios 8 in 2014. It is now pervasive. I’m sure your usage of the icon jolts every new Tap Forms user (and many old users.) It surprises them when they click what they now know as ‘Share’ and don’t see the Apple Share menu. It still jolts me and I mostly know the difference. You currently use it for both and I never remember which is which; will I will get another Tap Forms menu or will I get to the standard Apple Share menu I expect from using other ios apps (and writing share extensions in Pythonista.) I’m sure even your longer term customers have the same issue. They have learned the new share functionality from Apple announcements and their use of other ios apps. They don’t live in a vacuum. It is an important and useful ios feature. They want to know how to do the same thing in Tap Forms and how to distinguish standard Apple Sharing from other Tap Forms functionality. After all almost by definition a database user is a more sophisticated user than the average iPhone customer. They’ll get it. Most will see the change as an improvement, at least those that don’t hate all change. It would add clarity to the user interface by clarifying the difference between Apple standard features and Tap Form specific functionality. Historical application interface consistency over app versions is important but not when it adds confusion by adding ambiguity.

Apple is the 600 pound canary here. Right or wrong they define official ios interface definition and set user expectations. Using the the now ubiquitous share icon for anything else than the Apple Share functionality confuses many users. You can argue what icon to replace it with but I think it needs to be replaced. My feeling is that even though Apple stole the icon from earlier usage Tap Forms needs to adjust to the change. I think the real question is not whether to change it but which new icon will confuse existing users less.

[Brendan]

Ok, how’s this? See attachments…

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