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Comment by bachmeier | Hacker News Reader

This is related to the reason I had to stop using Sparkleshare. A few years ago I thought the idea was pretty cool, so I tried it out. Then I started to get conflicts on some of my documents. A couple days later, I knew for sure that a file hadn't synced.

Upon searching for a manual sync option (that would have to be a trivial addition) I came upon this issue[1]:

"No, adding an action for this would be a hack. The whole point of SparkleShare is to sync stuff automatically.... Just because something is easy to do doesn't mean it should be added."

I haven't touched Sparkleshare since.

[1] https://github.com/hbons/SparkleShare/issues/794

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Oh God, this issue thread is a perfect example of the problem with UX trends that's plaguing our industry.

Its TL;DR is this: this software is magic. It syncs automagically. You, the dumb user, are not supposed to know and care when it syncs or if it succeeds (hint: it's magic, it always does), and you're especially not supposed to tell the program that it has to do a sync. If your company's firewall interferes with the magic, go talk to your company IT.

The article sums up the issue perfectly: sometimes, as a user, I know better when the program is mistaken than the program itself. I should have a way to force it to refresh its state.

I call it "the Microsoft Clippy age"

It's the Windows model. Make the easy stuff super easy, and the hard stuff basically impossible. The assumption is that you'll adjust your business practices to match the software assumptions and definitely not the other way around.

Which is a little unfair to Microsoft, since they do have a fair bit of functionality only slightly hidden on Windows.

Apple is not without sin here. Spotlight is notorious for not finding files that are currently visible in a Finder window because the mdfind index didn't get updated properly. You can rebuild the mdfind index with a terminal command but that's too obscure for non-experts and it takes hours.

I think all of the Desktop environments do poor to terrible on internal search. I remember using a utility on Windows that just kept a live indexed filename database because Windows search couldn't even find filenames correctly at the time: Ah here void tools everything. Loved that util.

Gaps in the "recent files" coverage are always so noticeable over all the environments too.

Windows 7 does a terrible job of indexing your user directory. It's extremely frustrating to know the exact name of a file and yet Windows can't locate it because it is in AppData or something.

Sadly the devs, much like politicians and insurers, will look at the averages and find that we that may notice and know how to fix are swamped by the masses that will do something "weird" (or unquestionably follow some troll recommendation on a board) and then complain that the "app" is broken.

THIS

This example of a trend in current software development is extremely annoying and disturbing.

If your software is suppose to behave like magic, you had better make DAMN sure that it ALWAYS behaves like magic.

AND do it at the design stage, AND taking account of every possible unexpected input, AND fully verifying the code, AND adding checks on both the client and server side, AND adding fail-safes so that when the checks fail the software recovers properly, AND doing this for every damn feature.

But this presumptuous twat of a developer, obviously thinks that his first-cut at some agile magic code is perfect (and for a File-Syncing app no less!?!) and it is just the users that are foolishly wanting to mess up his ever-so-cool design.

And this is just one of thousands infesting our software development world today thinking that their ability to remove controls from the user is 'cool'.

If you have this attitude, it doesn't matter if you work for Google or some no-name startup -- you should leave. Now. You should not be building anything.

You are building a tool for the user, not a piece of art to be admired in a museum. Tools have user interfaces. Just as it is your job to avoid 10000 controls/widgets/menu options, it is also your job to give users a usable amount of controls appropriate to the task, and also to provide recovery options, like refresh, and preferably some control over how those controls appear ('Clean Screen' vs 'Advanced'...).

get practical /<rant>

edit fmt

Basically my reaction to what the major players are doing in Linux userspace these days.

Automatically assume anyone who uses all caps mid sentence hasnt thought through their point and is internet rambling. I stop reading everytime.

Quite sure there's a few of us, if you need to emphasise anything perhaps being more succinct is better than subscribing to this form of communication.

Thx for the tip. Sometimes a quick rant is more effective or all I've got time to post (vs a substantially edited essay).

I'm also disappointed in the formatting: I meant only the first sentence to have a mid-sentence all-caps. The list of "AND..." items was supposed to be just that, a list, each on it's own line with those as the bullet point leaders. Sadly, it refused to format as I entered it and mangled it all into one paragraph, and I didn't have time to take more than one shot at fixing/debugging it.

At least, though it was an imperfect post, there are those who liked it.

From the maintainer on that same issue thread:

> Something I would consider is a hidden way to do this that's more convenient, like having an Alt modifier on the menu that changes "Add Remote Project..." to "Force Sync" or something like it, since obviously SparkleShare isn't perfect. Although I'm not going to write it and it would have to work on every OS which could make it a considerable task...

Then lower down another user expressed interest in dev'ving that for one of the three supported platforms:

> I suppose a hidden way is better than none. I'd be willing to contribute a patch for the Linux side of the house, if one is available for another platform for comparison.

Finally, the author mentioned at the bottom something about redoing notifications before closing the issue.

So when you wrote, "I haven't touched Sparkleshare since," did you mean since reading that single post you quoted? Or did you continue reading the rest of the posts from that same day which I quoted, and then decided that you didn't want to contribute nor interact with potential contributors to help solve that issue in the way the maintainer offered?

> From the maintainer on that same issue thread:

...

That's the part that really makes me scratch my head. Why would you want to hide the option, especially if doing so requires a lot of work on multiple OSes? Add a menu option to force a sync, problem solved.

> Then lower down another user expressed interest in dev'ving that for one of the three supported platforms:

Which doesn't really help, because he was already told that's not enough, and the feature has never been added.

> So when you wrote, "I haven't touched Sparkleshare since," did you mean since reading that single post you quoted? Or did you continue reading the rest of the posts from that same day which I quoted, and then decided that you didn't want to contribute nor interact with potential contributors to help solve that issue in the way the maintainer offered?

It doesn't do what I need it to do, and I don't have a few hundred hours to figure out how to create a hidden menu item on three OSes, so yes, I haven't touched it since 2012.

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