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Forum thread: Dropbox
| Paul Holland 21 September 2012 20:05 |
Component: (stearsoft.co.uk/STEARsoft web interface/Palm-device) Suggestion: any chance of linking this to Dropbox as I have failed to get this to sync with my phone or iPad or iPhone |
| Marcus Butler (STEARsoft) 22 September 2012 17:37 |
Dear Paul, Thank you for your post. It is good to have feedback and to have an opportunity to explain a situation. How did your synchronisation fail? Looking at your account, it appears you either haven't installed STEARsoft (perhaps you only have a mac, not a PC?) or you havn't activated the trial license. If you have a PC, you should be able to get synchronising pretty quickly: There are video tutorials that take you through the full process on this website. If you get stuck, post back here with any error message you're getting and I'll help you further. Regarding Dropbox, this is a nice idea on the face of it, but unfortunately doesn't fit well with the main way STEARsoft is used. Having both a fully featured sycnchronisation system suitable for school wide deployment and the ability to synchronise with dropbox would cause conflict and compromises that would noticably handicap the product. Besides the better central control in school deployment, some of the reasons for not going the dropbox route are: 1) The data sent to Dropbox on its own would be useless in raw format except as a form of backup or transfer between devices... and iTunes can backup your data instead. 2) I myself am not an expert but I have been told that in the UK there are data-protection issues with sending data outside the UK, even if it is encrypted (Dropbox I believe stores your data in the US) so schools deploying STEARsoft do not want DropBox synchronisation even as an optionional feature. 3) Synchronising using DropBox would be slower than what is possible with the fast STEARsoft sync logic, and would require an internet connection. If you need to extract data from the App, you can use the Copy button on the Stats page which puts the data on the clipboard in tab-separated form. To be fair, this probably needs improving, as it turns out that most iPhone/iPad software does not handle tab-separated data sensibly. Thank you again for raising this. Yours, Marcus |
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