I agree with Cirrocumulus that these syncing issues are scary, and I don’t share the sentiments of others that this is some kind of user error issue, or not following the “rules.”
If you understand how Scrivener’s idiosyncratic syncing behavior works, that’s good. But there are lots of users using Scrivener for the first time, who are used to other syncing protocols that don’t have the same quirks. Them not following the “rules” is as much if not more of an experience design problem than a behavior problem.
If there’s one random street in the middle of an American city on which you are supposed to drive on the left side of the road, and there’s a head-on collision, whose fault is it? Those who designed the street might want to reconsider their decision.
There’s an opportunity here to educate new Scrivener users so stuff like this doesn’t happen.
I’m one of those idiots who didn’t follow the “rules,” because of a couple of things in my background:
1. I used to be a web developer/designer. When we “checked in” code, the system would check line by line for conflicts. If there was a conflict, we could see a line-by-line comparison of the differences between the files. We could then pick and choose lines and even “merge” into one final document.
2. I use Evernote heavily. It’s always open on my computer. But if I’m on the go, I can jot notes into a document, and have no syncing problems.
My understanding of Scrivener synching now is that it’s “dumb” – and I don’t mean that in a derogatory way. What I mean is that it seems that Scrivener doesn’t care about the contents of the files being synched. It only cares about the date the file was updated on Dropbox.
When I think about the technical limitations, I can see how that might be the case.
(Then again, maybe I’m wrong about it. After all, something screwy was going on with my issue. I synced with Dropbox while at the cafe. Nowhere in the Dropbox history is a file with my changes on it. Plus, even after it claimed to be synced, my iPad and Laptop showed different documents. Maybe there’s something else going on under the hood. I’d love to hear a Scrivener dev’s explanation of it.)
If I were designing this experience, I would force the user to check a series of boxes the first five times they synced with iOS (after five times, they could then opt to not see the warning again):
[ ] “I understand that Scrivener’s syncing is ‘dumb.’ It does not care about the contents of my documents. It only cares about the order in which they’ve been updated.”
[ ] “I understand that I should not update a Scrivener document on one device while it is still open on another device.”
Yes, the way Scrivener syncs is strange and nonsensical to someone used to other applications. I’m sure there’s a good technical reason for it. But having experience with those other applications and mistakenly expecting Scrivener to behave the same is not a failure to follow any “rules.” If Scrivener’s syncing is different from the state of the art, it behooves the developers to design the experience to prevent error.