#capparsa

At the beginning of the month, I gave myself the timeline to finish TimeTag syncing by the end of October. It seems that was a good estimate, since everything seems to be wrapping up on the project.

As of yesterday, the app now supports creating an account, logging in, syncing, and dealing with a few fringe cases like logging out and back in, etc. 

Syncing is now mostly stable (after countless hours of coding and testing) which is really exciting. Push notifications are operational too. Just about the coolest thing is having TimeTag open on my iPhone and iPad, hitting "start" on my iPhone, and having the timer start on my iPad. Every update to one of the apps "just works" on the other. 

What's funny is that a lot of people think this is just how things should work. In the age of iCloud, Dropbox and other cloud services, a lot of consumers (myself included) want all your devices to show the same data. We're always on the move, so if you start something on your iPhone, you want to continue it on your iPad. The new Continuity features of Yosemite really reinforce this as well.

However, the reality is that this type of 'magic' is INCREDIBLY complex to integrate--especially for databases (not documents). Documents are pretty straight forward to keep in sync, but databases bring up a lot of issues. You have to manage individual pieces of data, online/offline updates, relationships, and much more.

As such, TimeTag syncing has been something I wanted to code for years but never got the chance to sit down and code straight through. Until this past month. And now that it's nearly done, it's really rewarding to see it working as well as it is...