This is totally crazy talk dreamland fantasising, but have you guys ever had the thought of using something like Google Gears to add offline support? Some way to enter data whilst you're on a shoot on set and then sync it back into the main database when you get home. I guess you'd only need to be able to download a single project at a time.
That would be amazing!
We talk about this all the time and it would definitely be so sweet! We haven't started experimenting with anything like this yet though. One of the main challenges would be how to resolve conflicts that occur when changes have occurred on the same Things from both offline and online sources. And if those changes have cascaded into other Things as well, we need a way to potentially roll those changes back as a group. This is something else we're working on.
Perhaps there's smaller steps we can take in this direction without biting off the entire idea at once.
We'd love to hear other ideas about this and how people would like to use it.
Thanks Andy!
cheers,
kp
We have this listed in our todo list as "airplane mode", which has been requested multipel times by producers who want to do scheduling while up in plane. Though... now that Virgin is offering wifi in the air, we might have to change the name to "offline mode"!
I would second this request. It would be great to be able to load a project onto a client (for Mac/PC and iPad) capable of going offline for a period and then syncing the changes when back online.
For conflicts that occur after the timestamp of the client going into offline mode, there could be a conflict resolution panel that pops up when you reconnect. Showing the time of the change, user, and data changed. If you are unsure, you could keep the conflict in a queue and send a shotgun notification email to both users to discuss the change before resolving the conflict. I don't think this would be a common issue though. At least in the workflow I'm familiar with, usually a single person is in charge of updating specific categories of fields or tasks for his or her specific department.
In the case of needing offline mode to have shotgun data on Set, perhaps there could be a specific "on location" mode where Shotgun over the internet is locked to Read Only, and the offline project is hosted by a server on Set (like the iPad app LivePlay by LightIron).....not necessarily connected to the internet, but hosted on a computer broadcasting from a wifi router. So all computers within range on set could still sync and update to a single Project file, and then when that offline file is reconnected to the internet, it would update the read only internet hosted shotgun until the hosted offline version is flipped back to "internet mode". One way, no conflicts.
I've been running into the issue of using the review notes app on a spotty wifi connection. I get a dialogue box every few seconds letting me know that I'm working offline -- making taking the notes in the app impossible.
