Says Synced, isn't synced

[Alan]

Steps to reproduce

Go offline. Wait a long time. Look at the Sync status.

Expected result

It should say “can’t sync” or something link that.

Because sync means upload and download, and in this case any changes made elsewhere can’t be downloaded, so it isn’t synced.

Actual result

Environment

Windows, Chrome

Additional comments

This is important because if I try to edit something that has changed elsewhere, but I can’t 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 I want to wait until the document is synced with the latest stuff, but there’s no visible indicator that I may be out-of-date, unless and until I start making edits. Which I shouldn’t do until after I first sync.

[Shida]

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, it’d 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 it’s unsynced.

We’re made it behave this way deliberately so as to avoid constantly showing a “can’t sync” state every time we think you’re offline, unless you have local changes that are truly unsynced. Accurately determining offline status is also difficult.

[Alan]

“accurately determining”? It doesn’t 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.
It’s a temporary note if you aren’t actually offline because the moment it succeeds it will change back to synced.

I don’t care what it’s called, just something other than ‘synced’.

[Shida]

I’ve been observing Google Docs and it only says “All changes saved in Drive” when there’s no local unsynced changes. They seems to be trying to load an offline indicator somewhere else but because it’s an image, it doesn’t actually load while it’s offline so I don’t actually see any indication when it’s offline.

[Shida]

I mean, I totally get where you’re coming from. I just rarely observe any app that does it in an elegant way that’s indicative of what’s happening, but not so much as being distracting when you’re working on a spotty connection or being plain offline.

Feel free to show me some references of how other apps do it though, I’ll admit my experience is limited so any help is appreciated.

[Alan]

Microsoft OneNote does this pretty well.

[Shida]

I’ve only used the standalone OneNote app on Windows so I’m not sure I’d know how they do it. Would you be able to describe and maybe show some screenshots of how they do it?

[Alan]

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 haven’t shared the notebook. I’m not sure; just know I did this step ages ago to share notebooks between computers and people and with mobile.

Can’t 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: