Go offline. Wait a long time. Look at the Sync status.
Expected result
It should say âcanât syncâ or something link that.
Because sync means upload and download, and in this case any changes made elsewhere canât be downloaded, so it isnât synced.
Actual result
Environment
Windows, Chrome
Additional comments
This is important because if I try to edit something that has changed elsewhere, but I canât see it has changed, I may have conflicting changes and lose something. I want to wait until the document is synced with the latest stuff, but thereâs no visible indicator that I may be out-of-date, unless and until I start making edits. Which I shouldnât do until after I first sync.
The sync status is an indicator whether the sync server have received all the local changes. I understand your concern there, but if we were to make it show download status, itâd be hard to say exactly how long it takes from the time the app last synced with the server to when it should tell you that itâs unsynced.
Weâre made it behave this way deliberately so as to avoid constantly showing a âcanât syncâ state every time we think youâre offline, unless you have local changes that are truly unsynced. Accurately determining offline status is also difficult.
âaccurately determiningâ? It doesnât have to be accurate. Simply try to open a channel to sync, and if it fails more than once over a couple seconds, that would be good enough to note the state.
Itâs a temporary note if you arenât actually offline because the moment it succeeds it will change back to synced.
I donât care what itâs called, just something other than âsyncedâ.
Iâve been observing Google Docs and it only says âAll changes saved in Driveâ when thereâs no local unsynced changes. They seems to be trying to load an offline indicator somewhere else but because itâs an image, it doesnât actually load while itâs offline so I donât actually see any indication when itâs offline.
I mean, I totally get where youâre coming from. I just rarely observe any app that does it in an elegant way thatâs indicative of whatâs happening, but not so much as being distracting when youâre working on a spotty connection or being plain offline.
Feel free to show me some references of how other apps do it though, Iâll admit my experience is limited so any help is appreciated.
Iâve only used the standalone OneNote app on Windows so Iâm not sure Iâd know how they do it. Would you be able to describe and maybe show some screenshots of how they do it?
Just turn off the internet with your standalone app. You may have to change the notebook location to their server if you are just using your local drive and havenât shared the notebook. Iâm not sure; just know I did this step ages ago to share notebooks between computers and people and with mobile.
Canât sync:
Fully synced:
Syncing: This recurs for a moment every several seconds after it is fully synced.
There is also a dialog to view the status of multiple documents:
This recurs for a moment every several seconds after it is fully synced.