Explicit sync

[Deleplace]

What

A "synchronize now" button, and an indicator of success/failure.

Why

Preamble

I've been using this nice service for several years on many devices. It is very useful for me. Thank you so much to the whole team!

Problem

Synchronization between client and server sometimes fails. Some new notes are not uploaded, some recent notes are not imported, and we have no indicator to know if the client is "currently" (i.e. reasonably recently) up-to-date with the server, or not. With 2 clients open, we don't know which one is failing.

Disclaimer

Managing a distributed state is no picnic. I totally acknowledge that it is hard to guarantee that the state of an open client (currently in use) is always the same as the state of the server.

Tradeoff

In an ideal world, we don't need any bloated UI overhead for this : sync always succeeds and client data is always up-to-date with server data (in both directions). Fewer widgets is better. And this works indeed, most of the time!

When it doesn't, it would be very useful for me to:

• have the client acknowledge that is has not been able to sync for more than one minute (e.g. an orange bullet instead of green bullet),
• let me explicitly "try again" to sync,
• if the explicit action fails, then it's the right time to display an error message with a plausible cause (e.g. "connectivity problem" is not the same as "encountered corrupt data")

I call this a difficult tradeoff as it's simultaneously about confessing that things are going wrong, and adding complexity to mitigate the problem with a "better degraded experience".

I emphasize that this is very different from "fixing all the existing synchronization bugs". Fixing the bugs is of course useful, but IMO it's important to acknowledge that sync problems will always exist (e.g. internet connectivity issues) and still make the app as useful as it can be.

[Deleplace]

This problem is the same with all client distributions, and the suggested feature is similar.

However the implementation would live in different repos for different clients, which is why I created the same issue:

• in simplenote-electron #1897
• in simplenote-ios #639
• in simplenote-android #945

[jleandroperez]

Closing this one, since, as discussed here there is no timer stalling.

We'd love to track and fix specific sync'ing issues, please, feel free to reach out over this channel or support (at simplenote dotcom).

Thank you!