How to release a buggy app (and live to tell the tale)

Bugs! No matter how many times I decree that my coworkers and I must stop writing bugs, we keep on doing it anyways. Even worse, sometimes those bugs make it into production, where users run into them! The fact of the matter is, you are going to someday release a buggy app. Even with layers of […]

Displaying sync state

Early on, we realized that we needed some way to communicate to the user when data isn’t synced with the server yet. Otherwise, you could end up in a frustrating situation where you see a card you created on your device, but no one else can see it and you don’t know why. Design The […]

Sync is a two-way street

Most of what I’ve written so far has been about uploading changes from the client to the server. But we found it is equally important to download changes from the server periodically, too. What use is offline mode when you aren’t viewing fresh data? How can you share perspective with someone if you only ever push data and never pull? To that end, we also […]

Offline attachments

When writing offline mode, attachments proved to be a uniquely difficult aspect of syncing. The nature of attachments differ from other data in Trello. Most data in Trello are simple numbers and strings. Files are an entirely different beast; they’re large and unwieldy. File permissions On Android, when a file is shared with your app, […]

The two ID problem

I want to call out a surprisingly tricky problem we ran into when developing offline mode: handling identifiers. In Trello, all models have an ID. Each board, list, card, etc. It’s how we define relationships between models as well as how we communicate with the server about them. When you’re online-only, you can depend on […]