This weekend, Todd Geist and I took the train up from LA for a 33 hour code sprint and built the start of Worx, the next file for GoZync.

This is a great way to work and we got a ton done.

Todd on the Coast Starlight

Worx is a work orders system for iPad: users in the office assign orders to technicians and those techs “zync” the orders down to their iPads before completing the orders. Orders come down with contact info, maps, and a serious items database capable of browsing and selecting from tens of thousands of items.

Here are some screen shots from the iPad side…

Contact management & maps in Worx on iPad

Item selector in Worx: please forgive the testing data

Selecting items: grid view

…and a short video of the office side showing the virtual list Todd created for our side bar. Nice stuff.

Worx will be available as a ready-to-go solution for GoZync that you can tie to your own hosted file or use on its own. More soon.

GoZync can be a little tricky to add to your file, this is why many people build out from our example FMGo file, and why we offer implementation packages to do it for you. Once it’s in, however, GoZync is quite easy to extend. It is a framework, after all, and we built it to be extensible.

We anticipated that you’d add fields to mobile solutions you already deployed–thus GoZync can deliver new builds to your users–and we made it easy to add fields to mappings you’ve already established. This video shows how easy it is to add a field to a zync’ed solution. The video also demonstrates the zync working in FileMaker Pro (GoZync can sync zync data between Pro and Server just as it does between Go and Server.) Check it out…

While I usually put my iPad in the oven to simulate losing 3G connections, it is hard to record video that way.

So in this video, we just quit Go, breaking a 3G connection in the middle of pushing 500 records from an offline copy of FileMaker Go to FileMaker Server. GoZync ensures that only entire records make it, and that the local and hosted files agree on which records have yet to be sent… event when we abort the push in mid script. Enjoy.