Re: [Announce] DropN900 - the maemo 5 DropBox client
 

Excellent!

I am new to the thread , I think it may be answered before , sorry for duplicate question first..

Is the dropbox api allow to sync folder with server? e.g I may make a mobile folder and let it to sync with the server's specific folder manually/automatically.

Re: [Announce] DropN900 - the maemo 5 DropBox client
 

The dropbox api does not provide this. You can only download a file at a time. There is no callbacks from the api when changes occur in files. I am currently developing the automatic functionality so you can select a path to a folder in you dropbox and I'll auto sync it with some time inteval. I will have to poll the folders metadata and compare timestamps for current items on the device, this is the only way now to do it.

There are two buts here:

1. This might not be allowed in the eyes of the dropbox folks. They might notice this and ban my app key to make calls into the api. I will send them an email at some point. They might want to keep this kind of "nice syncing" only a feature in their own clients. But it seems they will not do a client for maemo 5 so we would be screwed.

2. There is a daily call limit to the api, I would assume to restrict so things like this cant be done with a large user base. I think the default was 5000 per/day. I don't know how many people have my app currently globally. I would say its still <100. But you can count how many metadata fetches/upload/downloads that will do daily already. When I make the automated sync that will surely double when people get into it :) I can request to increase the limit from dropbox, but I fear that my reasoning for the increase might make them decline.

If they start being troublesome we'll make a vote to the dropbox site to increase my apps limit so we can get sync to maemo 5. Blast a few thousand votes there and I'm sure they will bend :)

Btw. Gave you my vote for your competition category, good luck. Seems like a nice app! :)

---

For everyone:
I was instructed not to update my package to extras-devel untill friday due I'm a part of the coding competition. It's totally understandable to keep the competition fair as people get the app and they would get more functionality than what with I entered the race.

This is unfortunate as I have done +10h work already today to get this auto sync and nice settings ui going on. And it's probably ready in few days. At least I'll have time to properly test it so I wont ship crap as this is not the easiest thing to nail :)

Re: [Announce] DropN900 - the maemo 5 DropBox client
 

Too bad for the limit of API :(

Please feel free to tell us if Dropbox are start making trouble . I must support you!

Thanks! I have also voted your app. I want to have a Dropbox client for very long time!!

By the way , in order to prevet Dropbox unhappy with your access rate , I would suggest to set manual sync be the default of your application. It could also save the air time , let user do it when they have wifi access.

Re: [Announce] DropN900 - the maemo 5 DropBox client
 

Lovely app!
Not related to client itself but on the front page of this thread you are stating that different revisions of client are released on August e.g. 26.08.2010 ;)

Anyways greetings from another Oulu fellow!

Re: [Announce] DropN900 - the maemo 5 DropBox client
 

This would be an option, but I could also limit the timed polling to minimum 10 or 20 minutes. But then again you can click away as much as you like the "sync now" button :) And good idea to also give option to only sync if on WLAN, as I already have that info with my dbus monitoring. The dropbox folks have been nothing than nice to me so far. I am confident if we start hitting the api daily call limit they will increase it for us.

Please be on the lookout on console log prints for this. I print != 200 HTTP status codes to console and the dropbox provided error string. This will most likely tell us if we start hitting the limit.

I am on my summer holiday and seems I'm living it a bit too fast, haha :) Thanks for the note, fixed to first post. Nice to see other people from Oulu here, you can come to my door to make bug reports then o/

Re: [Announce] DropN900 - the maemo 5 DropBox client
 

I just downloaded a 46MB file and the progress spinner started but then stopped. All input to DropN900 was ignored. It appeared the program had hung. Eventually the download completed but I think it will be important to let the user know that the program is still working during larger/longer downloads.

Long file names get clipped on the top and bottom in the bottom right corner panel, not a big deal but doesn't look nice.

Also, remembering the last download location at least during the session would be nice so I don't have to navigate from DropN900 every time.

Frank

Re: [Announce] DropN900 - the maemo 5 DropBox client
 

Yes I have noticed the same hangup when downloading. Sometimes it does it with 300kb files and sometimes not with bigger and vice versa. I have not yet investigated whats the cause for this. In theory all my networking is done in a separate python thread. While the main thread that runs also ui would spin the animation. So in code I have taken this into consideration, before I made the threading ui always froze. I will look into it later, might be that i am polling the worker thread too ofter asking if its completed. I'm sure the threading code can be made better.

For the DL location. As said many times I'm making settings ui now that will be available end of this week. This will include setting the folder of your choosing for the default and also you can enable/disable the dialog. Disabling the dialog meaning "don't bug me with the dialog, just store to my default location directly when I click download", hope this will be enough for you :) Also now thinking that should make some kind of download manager widget that would queue downloads and show status of downloads for the current session. This could also show the auto sync status as I need a way to see progress of this.

Re: [Announce] DropN900 - the maemo 5 DropBox client
 

I'm sure that the default location setting will be useful. But I'm guessing others may not want to save by default to the same folder over and over.

For example, I'm downloading several pictures versus downloading several pdf manuals. I guess I don't get having a default location other than my home directory as I'll be downloading pretty varied things over time. But it's likely that I may download groups of items.

Maybe another way to address this would be to allow multiple selections to download at one time.

In any case, your application is very useful and nice looking as is and I'm very happy you wrote it and shared.

Frank

Re: [Announce] DropN900 - the maemo 5 DropBox client
 

You have a valid point. I hadn't thought of that kind of usage, this is why giving me use cases here is important. As this makes so much sense I can put this in plus its quite trivial to do :)

So work flow would be:
1. When you start app and download first time, dialog defaults to your set default download folder.
2. You travel to another folder and DL item.
3. Dialog will remember last used folder.
Extra: You can set from settings to always use your defined default DL folder without showing dialog.

Oh, and I have multi selection for DL/UL in mind. I looked at it quickly and seems that PyQt4 QFileDialog.getOpenFileName() is not working as expected on maemo. Next step would be to start implementing the dialog myself, and that is something i don't want to spend time on at this point. For DL I would need to modify the tree view/model to support selecting items somehow. Maybe a long press and "select for download" would be something to consider.

Thanks for the feedback.

Edit. Done, classic 4 liner :D

Re: [Announce] DropN900 - the maemo 5 DropBox client
 

This would fit my use case perfectly.

Frank