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Comment by pkaler | Hacker News Reader

What about merge conflicts?

Looking at their API docs it looks closer to rsync than to an API you could use for collaboration. I don't think you could edit a document on your iPhone and iPad at the same time. Both clients' changes would just stomp over each other. https://www.dropbox.com/developers/sync/docs/ios

What I'd like to see is someone offer operational transformation as an API. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operational_transformation

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The mobile sync system we've built gives you fine grained control of conflicts. It's got a native iOS API and is more like CoreData than Dropbox. It's been used by a bunch of AppStore apps over the last year, and we just announced a more powerful database backend.

http://blog.couchbase.com/get-started-couchbase-mobile

If there is a conflict then a conflicted copy file will be generated and then either the user or the app can use that to merge changes.

But while that paradigm might work fine on a desktop, where you can have multiple files viewable at a time (i.e. different halves of the screen), and an extremely easy way to copy-paste, it does not work well for a touch device, where both of those assumptions are invalid.

1Password is a great example of an application doing this well -- when there are conflicts, 1Password detects this, and there is an application-specific workflow that helps the user resolve the conflicts. It's pretty slick.

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