Synchronization panel added

December 25, 2009

A small tool has been added to picoBeat to help with synchronization: under the Tools menu is now a Synchronization panel that gives a list of existing ties between picoBeat databases and synchronized devices. Double clicking on a tie will give a brief log of the last synchronization operation.

The panel currently list synchronization done with both SyncML and picoBeat Sync for Windows Mobile. Log informations are currently limited but will be progressively expanded to give more and more details and help diagnostic possible synchronization issues.

In other news, Merry Christmas to everyone :)

Major update

December 19, 2009

As some might have noticed, the Tasks and Calendar module have been updated to include tag filtering  and a few other features (i.e: the calendar will now show due tasks). As with the Notes module, you can tag events or tasks by dragging them other the tag of your choice.

Under the hood, a lot of code has also been refactored to make everything cleaner, faster and more reliable. As such despite the added features, the new code is only slightly bigger and the interface should feel snappier.

You might need to clear your browser cache for everything to show up right again. (in Firefox: reload the page with shift+F5)

SyncML improvement: support calendar with tasks added

December 7, 2009

Within picoBeat, tasks and events are considered very different objects with different properties, and are stored in two separate databases. While this is how most phones and PIM software work, there are a few devices out there that consider that tasks and events should be stored and moved around together. This is a problem for synchronization as those phones will send all updates for tasks and events together while picoBeat will expect to synchronize them separately against two distinct database.

To get around this problem picoBeat now has a new virtual database available for synchronization called “caltasks”. It will synchronize both tasks and events at once by presenting what looks like a single database to the phones who work that way.

Major update to Notes

December 6, 2009

The Notes module has gotten a serious upgrade and is now a lot more powerful:

  • Notes now have tags (coma delimited list of keywords)
  • A toolbar has been added on top to search by keyword (over title or tags, not inside the text itself yet) or browse if you have hundreds of notes
  • A filtering bar has been added on the left that let filter notes based on their edition time or their tags
  • You can add tags to a note by simply dragging and dropping it on the tag on the left (dropping it on “none” will remove all its tags)
  • You can now publish notes to allow people to access them directly online

Hopefully this will make the module a lot more usable for managing lots of text notes. The filter/tagging interface (on the left) will be ported to other modules soon.