Fun to see google search or twitter search for dropn900. A lot more buzz than I was expecting with only announcing it here. I guess nowadays word travels fast Main issues with people seem to be with the sync missing, I doubt many of them have read the first post here to see why its not there. But that is ok, now I know what I have to do to make people happy.

Already did some improvements today. Mostly making the code easier to work with but also some functionality that end users will see. That is I changed the default download folder to /home/user/MyDocs/DropN900.

I also made my post install script in the dep to run python compileall to generate .pyc files into the applications /opt/dropn900 folder. As seems that during runtime you are running the app as "user" and python wont have permissions to create the files there. This should make the app load faster but I believe this pyc thing wont make the app run any faster. Now startup time authenticated is about 10 sec for me, haven't tested what is it with the new one. Thankfully I read some python optimization wiki page here and found this neat little tip

What I will focus on next:

• Network connection checks, graceful handling when connection is lost.
• Multiple file selection for upload/download.
• Making settings UI for the app
• Automatic folder sync when app is running for a single folder. I will make this disabled by default, makee it optional and make it so that you can enable it in the above settings ui.

Automatic sync:
For the automated sync I have to decide what is best. I have two main options, I'd like to have feedback here what to do

1. I could make this easier for people to understand and to use if I would sync the apps folder. This would mean having a "DropN900" folder in your dropbox root that you could set to auto sync. This would make clear to people what folder is actually synched with your N900 mobile device. Also this would make things easier for me to implement and to control how it operates. Would also be more safe so my app would not do anything harmful to already existing folders in you dropbox (just a precaution, i do have full access and i really dont want to make bugs that will piss off people) even though this will be completely safe as we are only asking metadata and downloading files.

2. Let the user select a folder/folders that wil be auto synced. This will be more error prone and harder to implement (at least ui wise). I guess this might be better option to expand to this way once I have the mechanism in place with #1 option.

Things to note:

• I do not get a contect hash or anything like this for files in the metadata. This means I will have to recognize purely on modified timestamps if a file has changed and it should be downloaded again to the device. I think this wont be a issue. As if the timestamp has changed at all we can go ahead and get the new file.
• I do not get callbacks to anywhere when your dropbox content has changed. This will have to be a manual timer to poll the folder content and see what files have changed.

DropN900 settings UI:
I'll do the following for the settings UI what you can control. Please tell me if you think something should be added here that I might not have thinked of.

• Changing the default download folder (default: /home/user/MyDocs/DropN900) this would also be the place where the automated sync downloads the content.
• Reset authentication button
• Automated sync enabled/disabled
• Automated time interval sync enabled/disabled + you can set the time interval (from lets say 1-60 min)
• Sync mobile folder now button (possibly can go to main menu also)

I will start working again on sunday evening and continue next week. As it happens this was my coding hobby project for my summer holiday and my real coding work starts again after next week. This has been so much fun and people have received the app so well that I wont leave this even when my work starts again. It just means I dont have time to do 6-12h work days for this project alone as I have been doing for the past few weeks