New & Noteworthy

Dropbox connector

Like already described here Remus provides a native Dropbox connector to synchronize information units with a Dropbox account.

Copy & Paste for Firefox on Linux and Google Chrome

We fixed several bugs occuring when dropping or pasting a URL from Firefox or Google Chrome.

The full changelog is here.

Why is there no official Eclipse release?

The IP policy at the Eclipse Foundation requires that all resources associated with this project are made available under Licenses that are compatible with the Eclipse Public License. Unfortunately a few icons in Remus are taken from a purchased icon-set and are not compatible, so we cannot pass a creation review until all resources are IP-clean. Currently we don’t have the resources to replace the icons but we hope to resolve this issue soon.

Plans for 0.4

The next release is scheduled for December, 22nd. The biggest effort of the next release will be the seamless integration into the Evernote infrastructure. In addition we hope that we can release a first version of our Remus Web-Application to make information management also available on mobile devices like iPhone or Android-based devices. Take a look at our Milestone-Plan and feel free to add your feature-requests.

We also want to thank everybody who provided feedback, filed bugs and new feature requests.

Since last week we started integrating the connector for the online-service Dropbox. In the following I’ll show you several scenarios how you can make your content of Remus accessible from everywhere with a dropbox account. For those wo don’t know Dropbox, Dropbox is a service which provides online storage in the cloud (free up to 2 GB).

DISCLAIMER: The screenshots (and screencast) is taken from the standalone application. If you have Remus installed in your Eclipse IDE switch to the “Information Management” perspective.

Connecting Remus with Dropbox

Actually there are two ways how you can connect to a Dropbox account:

1. Synchronization with the Folder connector: If you have the client software from Dropbox installed, you have an extra folder in you user folder called “Dropbox”, which synchronizes automatically all content with your online content. You can now create a Local Folder connector pointing to a subfolder within that folder and synchronize the content in your Remus instance with this folder.
2. Synchronization with the Dropbox Connector: Remus has a separate connector to access the content of your Dropbox directly via HTTP. So if you don’t want to install any additional software you can use this connector. This connector creates automatically a folder called “Remus” in the root folder of your dropbox and synchronizes its data within that folder.

Creating a new connector and checkout of remote content

Before you can synchronize your content you have to create a connector and checkout the content of this remote folder. This is a very easy task. You have in your coolbar a little bar with three icons.

1. The first one is to create new local information units.
2. The second is for creating and checkout a new remote repository.
3. The third is the “Synchronize” button, which updates your local or remote content

Connecting to Dropbox

Remus uses the so-called oAuth Mechanism to authorize the user on dropbox. That means your credentials are not stored locally by Remus, but the user has to grant Remus the right to access the account based on specific security tokens. So don’t worry, Remus never knows your Dropbox username or password (picture below shows the confirmation page of dropbox.com).

Creating content and committing content

After you have finished the initial checkedout, a new folder with special decorations appear in your local navigation. You can create new information units and categories under the folder (the picture below shows 2 unsubmitted information units under the dropbox-folder). Editing content can be always done offline.

If you finished editing the content you can synchronize all elements; use therefore the button in your toolbar (see picture)

After the synchronization the decorations of the information units have changed to indicate that they are in sync with the remote repository (see picture).

Using the folder connector

If you already have the software from dropbox installed, you surely want to use the folder connector. The usage of the folder connector is following exactly the same mechanism like Dropbox connector, the only difference is that you don’t have to authorize at dropbox.com, you only have to point the connector to a folder within your Dropbox-folder.

Conclusion

With the synchronization mechanism regarding the online-service Dropbox you can have the content of Remus on different computers. The connectors are compatible to each other, that means you can use on Computer A the folder connector and on Computer B the Dropbox connector to synchronize the content of your local information pool.

Advantages of the Dropbox-Connector

• No installation required
• Can synchronize multiple Dropbox accounts in one Remus instance
• No firewall issues
• No password stored locally

Advantages of the Folder-Connector

• Comitting is faster (the “real” synchronization is handled by the dropbox application)

Screencast

Below you can find a screencast on how to synchronize with Dropbox.

A fundamental requirement for a Information Management is a powerful Task-Management. In the following I’ll show you the capabilities of Remus regarding task-management. I’ll cover the following topics:

1. Creating/Editing Tasks
2. Logging units of work to your tasks
3. Synchronization with Outlook or other remote repositories
4. Task-oriented Desktop-Integration
5. Reporting of Tasks and Logged Work

Creating and Editing Tasks

To create a new Task use the File -> New Wizard and browse to the Task-Element. After you have entered a name of the task and its location in your global structure a new editor will be opened. In this editor you can edit all the neccessary elements for a task. If you switch to the second tab (“Work-Log”) at the bottom of the editor you can enter new units of work.

If you have created a few tasks you’ll end up with something like the screenshot below

Just for explanation. This screenshots shows 4 categories: The two on top are only stored locally, the 3rd is synchronized with my local Microsoft Outlook instance and the category at the bottom is synchronized with my E-Mail provider, that means this two tasks are stored in the cloud and are accessible from everywhere.

As you can see the task-icons have some small decorators, which are indicating the status of a task: The green decorator (e.g. at element “Visit aunt Mary”) indicates that the task is completed, and the red decorator (e.g. at “Ask Jeff for RAM”) indicates that the due-date is in the past and the task is not completed yet.

You can have several overviews of created tasks. If you switch to calendar view (at the bottom of the navigation) you’ll see all your task in a weekly view, if they have a due date (see screenshot)

Another possibility to create an overview is the report of all tasks of a category. How to create reports see the section below. The following screenshot shows an overview of all Tasks that are located under my “Tasks-Demo” project.

Worklog

A nice feature of the task-type is the ability to log the time you have worked on a task. To create a new work-log entry switch to the second tab and use the plus-button. See the screenshot of a task with multiple units of work.

Synchronization of Tasks

You can synchronize your tasks in the same way you synchronize other information units. By default Remus supports the synchronization with Microsoft Outlook and every protocoll-based connector. For a detailed tutorial how to work with remote repositories, see the Wiki.

Desktop-Integration

Remus’ Desktop integration gives you two possibilites to bring your tasks to the desktop. To enable this two section go into your Desktop-Panel configuration (Extra -> Preferences -> Remus -> Desktop Integration) and drag the two templates (“Worklog” and “Tasks”) into your panel-configuration, see the screenshot below.

After you have applied the new configuration the desktop panel will show up with two new sections

1. This is a little overview of your tasks grouped by the due-date (Today, This week and Next week). Double click on an element to open the appended task. Tasks with a due-date in the past are marked with a red font-color
2. The work logger. After you have chosen a task you can start tracking the time you are working on that task (use the buttons at the bottom to start and stop tracking). The effective time will be saved within the tasks worklog.

Reporting

Remus comes with a complete Reporting & BS Tooling to create reports based on your local information pool. By default Remus ships a few report-templates. To create a new report use again the File -> New Menu and scroll down to Report. In this wizard you can choose a template or start with a blank report. For the task-reporting Remus provides currently three templates. After you have chosen a template you only have to specify some input parameters for the report and you’re done. Watch the screencast below to see how this works in detail.

Advanced Drag-and-Drop

To create new tasks you can user either the manual procedure via File->New->Task or if you want to create a Task from a Text from another application you can use the rule engine. By default there are already some rules installed if you want to create your own rule here is an example. The requirements are: If I copy a text to remus, I want to have a rule that creates a new Tasks in my private task folder, with me as asignee, priority is low and the due-date should be in one week. Ok see the screencast how this can be accomplished:

Conclusion

As you can see Remus has several features for managing your task. Especially the reporting features are very useful, it allows you to create individual representations of your tasks and you also can export them as PDF, Excel, Word, etc..

Sharing repositories gain more focus

We are aware of the fact that Remus must provide more features regarding the online synchronization with remote server systems in the cloud. Additionally there is a fundamental need for an alternative client that allows you to browse through your data with alternative devices. Our first step that was finished with todays release is to introduce a new server-implementation for Remus (see here). This server can be run in your local network or in the world-wide-web and provides a HTTP interface to read or write data that will be synchronized with Remus. In the next weeks we’ll introduce a web-application that is visualizing a part of your local-workspace data and lets you create new information units with a browser that are synchronized with your local installed Remus instance. This will allow you to browse through your data from everywhere with every device that has a browser. Currently we’re also evaluating the efforts to develop an Android-App; if you have futher feature-requests don’t hestitate to contact the Remus dev team.

Translating into other languages

We recently started to translate Remus into German, we hope to to provide a german language pack at the end of Q2 2011. If you want to see Remus in other languages, please help us translating.

Join the Remus-Webinar

On May, 9th there will be a Webinar about Remus and its functions with a demo. This webinar is for free, for more information and registration see http://live.eclipse.org/node/1005

• Executing rules is more flexible. It is now possible to execute complex scripts without relying on installed information types
• Setup of Webshotting was refactored is now much more comfortable. No more dealing with parameters.
• Making screenshots is now much more powerful. You can add annotations like text and simple figures like rectangles, circles or arrows to the image.

We released a tutorial on how to setup Remus for Backlogging of links, texts and code-snippets. We highly recommend the reading to use the power of simple data-transfer to Remus. You can find the tutorial here.

We also want to anounce an upcoming Webinar for Remus. It is free of charge and you can register at http://live.eclipse.org/node/1005

Developer API

The probably biggest part was a refactoring of the different components to make Remus consumable in small parts. As you probably know Remus is not only a standalone tool but can be also used to build complete new applications. Therefore we rebuilt the structure to make it easier to built own applications based on Remus. Another goal for us is to port the current application into the web, so that it runs in a browser.

New connectors

• Google Calendar
  If you have a Google Account you can already manage your contacts and calendars with Remus. Connecting to Google services is an important feature for us because many people are already using these services and they are very well accessible through an API. If you’re using a cell phone with Android (which heavily uses Google services) you’ll get more and more features to synchronize the contents of your cell phone and your desktop with Remus.
• WebDAV
  In the last months we got many feature requests regarding the online synchronization of the complete workspace. However, Remus uses a mechanism of connectors to synchronize its content with a remote repository, there won’t be an additional mechanism to synchronize the contents. For making your content accessible through the web we decided to add WebDAV support, a very simple way to put and get files from a webserver over HTTP. We favorited this prior to FTP because you don’t have issues with your firewall and the two biggest german freemailers (GMX and Web.de) offer some free storage which can be accessed via WebDAV. So if you have an account at GMX or Web.de you can start synchronizing all your content of Remus over the internet today.

New information types

• PDF
  We started to implement some document management capabilities, the first information type is PDF. Remus can handle PDF documents very well, provides a very nice slider to browse through the pages, indexes the contents of a PDF and supports simple PDF Manipulation features, like setting metadata, splitting and merging of documents.

What else?

• Subsearch Results: Remus provides now finer granulated results on special information types: This is important for information types which have in general much information that can be searched.
• General Rules on Desktop-Drop Rules: We have implemented the possibility to add any Groovy script after a drop/paste of data into the application.
• Performance: We disconvered that the application becomes slow if you are working with very huge information projects (over 10.000 items). The current release is much faster and the starting time could also be reduced by loading different components lazily on-demand.
• Bugfixes: Dozens of fixed bugs

Community

We started a blog where we will publish interesting tips and tricks regarding the daily work of Remus (http://remus-tips.blogspot.com/). If you have a tip, we’re waiting for your email

We also want to thank all the people that reported bugs and raised feature requests. This helped us very much improving the application. We also received many very good feedback, which motivates for the next challenges.