The time has come. Daylite with Sync Services support will go into beta on Friday or Saturday.
Making a multi-user system work with the inherently single user Sync Services has been challenging. For example, User A has an important shared contact on his/her iPhone and User B also has that contact on her iPhone. She then deletes that contact on her iPhone. After both users synchronize, User A would no longer have that contact. You can imagine that User A would be mighty upset. But with Daylite 3.5 all they have to do is go into the new Trash and restore the contact – even if it was deleted days or weeks ago!
This is just one example of the kinds of changes we had to do in order to support Sync Services properly. There are all kinds of “under the hood” changes.
If you are comfortable beta testing, please sign up as soon as possible. Read the terms and follow the link on the Daylite Beta page to get on the mailing list. People on the list will get an email when the beta starts.
Until next time…
AJ
Tom says:
AJ,
Wouldn’t it be easier just to have a pop-up warning asking User A to confirm they want the contact delete? If User A does not then that contact would be protected from future syncs with User B but could still be synced with User C, D, E etc if needed.
I have in mind that it would be similar to when someone wants to beam me a contact. I have to click OK in order to accept the new information.
This just seems better than having contacts moved to a trash where they could accidentally get deleted. And of course the frustration of searching for a contact that has been moved.
-Tom
AJ says:
We can not intervene on device obviously (or in other apps for that matter) and that is also true during the sync (the sync happens in the background and during idle time). Besides, the user getting the alert would be the same user that deleted it from the device in the first place, so they are likely to say “yes” to this kind of dialog – all this unbeknownst to the first user.
Tom says:
AJ, I don’t think we’re on the same page here. Why would the person who deleted the contact get the message? Maybe I’m just misunderstanding the function. As I read your post when two people sync and one has deleted a contact that both users have/had in their DL they would both then be deleted.
EXAMPLE: As I understand what you’ve described: AJ deletes Steve from his DL and then syncs with Tom who also already has Steve in his DL. The sync would therefore remove Steve from Tom’s DL so he would thus no longer have Steve’s contact info unless he retreived it from the Trash.
Would this process need to take place each time they sync?
Surely I’m misreading your original post.
AJ says:
Yes you are misreading. But this is not the right place to discuss these technical details. Join the beta if you want to get in-depth.