Now that you have the faster Sync in place and you have a barcode engine in your toolkit as part of Sync Key maybe now is the time to look at capture and regeneration of barcodes as a new type of data entry.
Hi Joe, thanks for sticking with us and writing us again! We still have a bit more to do on the Sync features before we switch back to other development items: we’re currently working hard on a 4.1 release to fix some Sync bugs and add some features that are needed for support purposes.
It’s true, we do have support for generating and decoding 2D bar codes, but we’re specifically only using it to represent one thing: the Sync Key, with our own encoding format. This doesn’t translate directly into support for automatically serializing 2D bar codes to Codebook Entry records and vice versa (never mind the UI for it).
We’ve discussed bar code scanning/viewing a bit more internally, and feel that implementing image/attachment support would fulfill your use case along with providing this highly requested feature to all Codebook users. Because of this, we don’t plan on implementing bar code scanning/display in the interim.
With this many devices, making sure they have the current version is at time a hassle. Having a journal entry that give the time stamp of the last Sync and the most recent change would be quite handy.
It would be ideal to make this easier to do, we agree. With a centralized, automatic background sync system it would be quite easy to do! But until we get there, we can at least display the last Sync date for the user, similar to what you’ve described with a journal entry. The last Sync date is currently displayed on the Sync view in Codebook for iOS and Android, right below the Options rows. To view it in Codebook for macOS, click on File menu, Database Info (⇧ ⌘ I) and you’ll see it displayed there. Does having this timestamp available help you out at all? Perhaps we could make it more visible?
On the muni device sync item the slick solution is a quick check of the time stamp in the cloud file during Codebook startup and companies to local time stamp.
Well, there’s nothing simple about quickly checking a cloud service for a time stamp every time the user logs into Codebook on iOS or Android, it would be a big change! Not that it would be difficult for us to do, but it has to be done quite cleanly, and some users would undoubtedly want to opt-out. We think this is more appropriate for background syncing with a centralized service, where the user has clearly opted in to such behavior.
Thanks as always for your feedback, we really appreciate it!