chasing daisies... » snys

SNYS: latest progress

archon — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 13:28:18 +0000

Sorry, I’ve been tremendously busy recently and haven’t had much time to work on the existing bugs in SNYS. I do hope to be able to patch a few up this Christmas, and also write some diagnostic scripts which may help track down why some people just can’t use it at all. (This is still really baffling me.)

I have a new version which traps some syncing bugs more effectively for those who can use it, which I will upload later today.

Simplenote Yojimbo Sync v0.31

archon — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 11:56:08 +0000

It barely deserves a whole new post, but in case anyone is following this tag, I’ve added a version 0.31 of SNYS with a few new debugging checks in it now. I won’t put comments on here – please add any you have to the v0.3 post.

Simplenote Yojimbo Sync v0.3(1)

archon — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 20:25:17 +0000

As the previous post suggest I’ve uploaded a new version of SNYS, 0.3. This has some more extensive logging options as some people are still having issues, but for those who aren’t, this version stays running and repeats the sync once per hour. You might wish to have it run on startup if you are that way inclined; I am.

Download from the dedicated page as usual.

Edit: Please can you post (a) the version of OS X you are using and (b) the version of Yojimbo you are using, when reporting a bug? I have a feeling that there may be some subtle Applescript differences involved here, and even if there aren’t, I’d like to eliminate that possibility.

Applescript and regular actions

archon — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 13:28:07 +0000

I was wondering how I could have Simplenote Yojimbo Sync (henceforth, SNYS) running regularly, and thinking of all sorts of methods involving launchd, but actually it seems very simple to do with Applescript, which is where I should have looked in the first place.

From p76 of the Applescript Language Guide:

Stay-open script applications can perform periodic actions, even in the background, as long as the script application is running.

What I need therefore is an idle handler.

If a stay-open script application includes an idle handler, AppleScript sends the script application periodic idle commands—by default, every 30 seconds—allowing it to perform background tasks when it is not performing other actions.

So, I will put one of those in and it will run the sync periodically and everything will be happy. That should be straightforward.

Simplenote Yojimbo Sync v0.2

archon — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 12:58:49 +0000

I’ve produced a new version of SNYS, 0.2, with the following changes:

Version checking at startup, with the option to download now or later, or skip a version.
Logging information to ~/Library/Logs/Simplenote Yojimbo Sync.log, which is the primary purpose of this version, to get some more debugging information for the people for whom it doesn’t seem to work. If you are one of these people, please leave a comment or get in touch with me on the Yojimbo or Simplenote API lists.
A couple of little coding improvements which probably aren’t very interesting to most people, but which you can see if you’d like to open the bundle and peer at the scripts.

There is also now a dedicated project page for this, which will always contain a link to the latest version, so you should go there to download it.

Planned future improvements

It’s been suggested that the app have an option to sync with the simpletext.ws website used by Writeroom as well as or instead of Simplenote. I think this is a good idea, as there is an API and also I do own a copy of Writeroom for the iPhone, and it shouldn’t be very hard to just change the method of finding notes, but I’ll make sure the basic sync structure works for everyone first.
I find it a bit counter-intuitive that deleting a note on one platform doesn’t delete it on the other one and in fact re-syncs it next time unless you delete it on both. However, again, until I’m sure the basic sync structure works for everyone, I’m going to keep it like that, because it minimises the chance of data loss. Once that’s sorted out, I plan to fix it so that deleting a note deletes it on both.
There needs to be an automatic sync option. At the moment you could use something like Lingon to run it, but that isn’t a very user-friendly method. Unfortunately, adding this feature is complicated by the fact that I have no idea how to do it. I’m sure it can’t be that hard.

Simplenote Yojimbo Sync v0.11

archon — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 12:46:03 +0000

This is the first version of my syncing script between Simplenote and Yojimbo. (Well, v0.1 was the first, and was pretty much the same just without Growl support, but this is the first public version.)

If you would care to try it out, I would be delighted – please leave any comments, bug reports etc on this post. (Even just “works as expected” would be appreciated.)

Documentation and download

(see main project page)

Edit: Of course, Sod’s Law, there was an installation bug in the initial version. I’ve now fixed this.