These past months have been very productive, where significant development was carried out on Sync for iCloud, where I’ve re-worked big chunks of the application.
SyncDeck
I have continued working on the SyncDeck app (formerly Sync for iCloud) to include more best practices and advanced Android SDK components, such as Room, Coroutines, and Jetpack. This meant that a lot of stuff had to be re-written from scratch.
Extensive use of fragments is now being made in the folder browser. A new fragment is created for each open folder. This allows for faster movement between folders, whilst also keeping in memory attributes of folder which have been opened.
Room databases are now being used to cache synchronised photos from the iCloud Photos library on your device and to keep track of upload and download tasks. Caching of photos into a room database allows pre-loaded photos to be loaded significantly faster when closing and re-opening the application. This would be especially beneficial for users with large photo libraries, where a loading cycle would now take seconds as opposed to several minutes. With respect to the tracking of file transfer progress, a database enables the queue to remain cached even when the application is completely terminated, allowing the possibility of file transfer continuation after application closure, as well as better handling of file transfer status.
More under-the-hood changes were carried out, however, the above were highly material to the functionality of the application. Further fixes are in the pipeline, more specifically to the photo library. However, the above changes should provide a much better user experience and significantly better performance. Thus, they were of most importance and were tackled first.
I will be rolling out the application to a small group of install base, increasing the roll-out percentage should no significant issues arise with the latest release.
IO.mt website updates
I have continued with updates to the website, including additions and changes to content, as well as updating of components.
There are still some issues in relation to search-engine optimisation (SEO), which I am tackling bit-by-bit. My priority is to get the applications updated, with website updates being given a lesser priority.