Polish back-ends experience
Back-ends are already coded. Actually, there was much time invested in this feature: Luca's GSoC, Madhu's GSoC and so on. The purpose of this blueprint is to remove last few rough edges, make programmers and users feel good about using back-end feature - give them positive experience.
There are two levels we need to work on:
programmers -- allow them to write full standalone back-end as fast as possible and as less pain as possible
users -- synchronizing their tasks with their favorite on-line service without any hassle
Programmers
List of problems (need to elaborate and propose solution):
Hello World back-end -- should be under 100 lines of code
We need to make it as simple as possible to get as many backends as possible => another feature for GTG users.
United handling of errors, united behavior across backends
Special configuration parameters =>> use fallback entry widget.
Specifying only important things:
- how to authenticate -- most of the services use similar 2-step system: 1, open the webpage 2, enter the code
- how to fetch list of current tasks, or the whole set of current tasks
how to transform an online task into GTG task - sync online => GTG
how to transform a GTG task into an online task - sync GTG => online
Use cases
Irvine is a very talented high school student and he has created his own online todo list. He heard about GTG which is used among Ubuntu users. Irvine finds an tutorial "How to make GTG backend in 5 minutes" on GTG blog and using method copy'n'paste he is able to make hack back-end for his method in 30 minutes.
Mike is a big fan of GitHub. He decides to build a back-end for GitHub. In the configuration dialog he can allow user to specify the name of GitHub project to follow what other backends usually don't use. Mike doesn't even notice there could be problem with requesting parameter like this. In the parallel universe, Mike is really angry, because he has to spend extra hour to find a way around to specify GitHub project name parameter.
Users
Handling features that are not available to online service: start date, due date, subtasks; also additional parameters of online service like: estimated time to finish, progress and so on.
Using GNOME's online config tool.
Use cases
Peter gets a new smartphone and wants to synchronize his tasks with the phone and the computer. He chooses one of the most famous services like Remember the Milk, Google Tasks. He adds a new backend and his tasks are magically synchronized everywhere.