Crème 1.5 is nearing completion and will hit App Store some time in the next few weeks. Cloud Sync will be an important feature in this version. In short, Crème will sync its configuration to the cloud, so that if you happen to run Crème on multiple devices, they stay in sync.

Please read this information to understand what Cloud Sync means for your privacy and security.

Why this is necessary

Today, Crème works only on the iPhone so this is not a big deal, most people just use one iPhone. (Though, if you upgrade your phone and want to continue from where you were, Cloud Sync helps you too.) But we plan to expand to different platforms (say, iPad in addition to iPhone): Cloud Sync makes sure that your activity on one device will sync to others. A key feature of Crème is keeping track of your unread tweets, and it would be silly if you had to “read” them several times on multiple devices. If a tweet is marked read on one device, other devices will also know this.

What gets synced

Three things: your read tweet ID-s, your bookmarked tweet ID-s, and the different “pages” you have set up. If you run Crème on a new device for the first time, it downloads your configuration from the cloud so you don’t have to set up the same thing several times.

How the security works

You’ll notice that there is no separate login for the syncing to work. Once you have signed in to Crème with your Twitter account from any device, it just works. This is an example of some of the great things that developers can do, now that Twitter is really pushing its OAuth authentication and supporting technologies like OAuth Echo. Crème creates a special request to the Crème API server with your security tokens, and Crème API server talks to Twitter using OAuth Echo to validate that it’s really you. Once Twitter responds positively, Crème API server continuously stores and syncs the data arriving to/from Crème apps on different devices.

How you can see your data

Just go to my.cremeapp.com and see for yourself.

How you can delete your data

If you do not like the syncing, you can delete the data from the server. Go to my.cremeapp.com and follow the instructions.

Note that there is no way to turn the syncing on or off: when you delete the data and then use Crème again, some of the data will again get synced to the server. If you don’t like this, please don’t use Crème.

Do tell more about the technology behind this

There is no good technology available for app developers today for this kind of easy invisible syncing, so we had to roll our own. We are quite happy with how it came out: the code on both client and server side is elegant, short, and scalable. It’s powered by a Redis datastore, Tornado app server, and OAuth Echo for security. We may open source it and/or offer it in some other way at some point. Ask us if you’re interested.