iOS5, iCloud and Pleco

[scykei]

Yeah, and let it sync documents and history data too, if that is possible. :\

 

[mikelove]

Does this mean that you are planning to enable syncing flashcards (and, presumably, dicts) between devices? I have an iPhone and iPad and like to have the same flashcards/settings/dicts on both devices, but it is a bit of a chore to keep doing this manually.

Yes, we are planning to add sync support for those. The basic problem is that Apple's sync system is primarily designed to work with devices that are almost continuously online; it makes life really easy in those cases, but if you have a device that's frequently offline (as many many Pleco customers in China do), it's possible for two devices to get out of sync and then resolving those differences gets very tricky. If we were content to resolve sync conflicts by asking you to pick one version of your database or another, we would have added this in a minor update shortly after iCloud launched, but because we want to resolve conflicts at the database record level (merging results of two different flashcard tests) it's a much much more involved feature requiring some major changes to our flashcard database format.

Dictionaries would actually be a bit easier since there's no question of merging the contents of two records - we'd simply show users the two changed versions and let them pick one - but we don't want to support those without supporting flashcards at the same time.

Yeah, and let it sync documents and history data too, if that is possible. :\

Documents are quite easy, history we hadn't actually thought about - so you want your history of recent entries to be synced too? That may be updated a bit too frequently to sync easily, but we can certainly investigate it at least.

 

[jackharrison]

Hi Mike,

Any ideas on the timeline for sync of flashcards between iPhone and iPad?

Is there any current workaround (e.g. iCloud, evernote, iTunes)?

Best,

Jack

 

[mikelove]

Any ideas on the timeline for sync of flashcards between iPhone and iPad?

Not really, it'll be ready when it's ready but we don't want to rush it and end up with something that feels half-finished and doesn't properly handle things like conflict resolution. And handling those things correctly requires some major revisions to the way our flashcard database system works - we have to store a lot of extra data regarding recent changes / dates / etc.

Is there any current workaround (e.g. iCloud, evernote, iTunes)?

If it's primarily a matter of making sure both devices have all of your cards (which seems to be the big issue for most people), the best bet would probably to do a "Search Cards" for cards created since you last synced, Edit / Batch / Export the results, get them onto your other device (via "Share Files" or email or whatever other method you like), and import them in on there.