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:
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.
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.
The first one is to create new local information units.
The second is for creating and checkout a new remote repository.
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:
Creating/Editing Tasks
Logging units of work to your tasks
Synchronization with Outlook or other remote repositories
Task-oriented Desktop-Integration
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
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
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..
