Jamie,
Let me attempt to address some of your concerns. We acknowledge that the user experience surrounding sharing and simultaneous editing and conflict resolution isn’t the best it could be today (even for tech savvy users). (Note that none of what I write here should be construed as a promise of features to come.)
1. News event vs. file download. Yes, you’re right. It’s not clear that the news event is no indication of whether or not the file has actually sync’ed to this device.
2. Checking out files for update. This is one feature that many have proposed. However, it can get thorny once you ask other questions like: how long is the file checked out for? What happens if the person/device never checks the file back in (machine is wiped/stolen, etc.)? One could implement a timeout or override, but this seems complicated. What would avoid this whole mess is if there were some *visual indication* given to the users of the Live Mesh Folder that User A is editing this file *right now*, so you might want to hold off on your changes until she’s done. This is hard to do today. Once Mesh gets more broadly adopted, one could imagine applications interacting with the Mesh through the APIs to do exactly this sort of thing. In fact, you could take it one step further and have multiple users simultaneously editing and resolving… but I am getting ahead of myself.
3. Ghosted file while downloading update. Ah excellent. We actually implemented this exact behaviour at first: replace the file in the Live Mesh Folder with a ghost the instant you know that there is a newer/updated copy of the file in the Mesh somewhere. This would indicate to the user that something new is on its way, so you might want to wait for it. (I’m a huge proponent of this.) Unfortunately, we don’t yet have the UX to allow users to open up the older copy of the file to look at (or even edit), until the new one gets downloaded. This is critical because you don’t necessarily know when you’ll get to downloading that file (slow connection, or the machine with that file is offline, etc.). So we decided to go with the current experience for now (it’s less confusing as well, as your files don’t suddenly disappear). I would guess that in the future we allow this as an option for users to choose which type of experience they want.
4. Manually kicking off sync. Agree. And why not take this one step further? Sync this file (and only this file) right now. Sync this folder right now. Sync this folder the next time I’m online. Stop sync’ing this folder for 3h. Stop sync’ing for 5h. The possibilities are endless.
5. ‘Keep this item’ button greyed out in Conflict Resolution dialog. Ah yes. This is a bug. It has to do with how FeedSync deals with conflicts (which you can read about in the spec) and with how the Live Mesh client does conflict resolution. Suffice to say that it is annoying and we want it fixed too. :)
6. More info in Conflict Resolution dialog. Yes I remember that thread too.
I hope that offers some comfort. Your cries of frustration are not in vain.
Richard Chung [ Live Mesh ]
