iCloud to Auto-Resolve Sync Conflicts

[mave1969]

If my secretary adds an appointment to my calendar (remotely via the office) after I've already booked something myself, it's likely her newer entry will not be "the truth" at all, and my prior appointment will be written over. I could then miss my proper appointment because I didn't "verify" it prior, and that would suck.
...sorry, got carried away there.

The bit you're missing is that with iCloud, when you book something yourself it automatically gets pushed to the calendar your secretary sees, so she never adds a conflicting appointment in the first place. The pervasive concurrency of data is going to stop a lot of these conflicts happening, so the process of resolving them is required less often, and eventually becomes unnecessary.

People worrying about whether iCloud can possibly know which is "the truth" are not seeing the wider aim of Apple, which is to eliminate the possibility of conflicts happening at all.

 

[wonderspark]

The bit you're missing is that with iCloud, when you book something yourself it automatically gets pushed to the calendar your secretary sees, so she never adds a conflicting appointment in the first place. The pervasive concurrency of data is going to stop a lot of these conflicts happening in the first place, so the process of resolving them is required less often, and eventually becomes unnecessary.

Ah, I did miss that. That does make sense, then. I get to be Maximus The Merciful after all.

 

[tigress666]

If my secretary adds an appointment to my calendar (remotely via the office) after I've already booked something myself, it's likely her newer entry will not be "the truth" at all, and my prior appointment will be written over. I could then miss my proper appointment because I didn't "verify" it prior, and that would suck.

It would need to be an option, or I'd have to fire people with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my appointments. And they will KNOW my name is The...

...sorry, got carried away there.

Alright I +1'ed your post just cause of amusing use of reference *grin*.

But, seriously considering your point, I am guessing it will tell you there were conflicts, just after it finishes or maybe even during but it finishes while you consider (rather than before and waiting for your input before it finishes synching)? At least I'd hope it would mention there were conflicts and not just leave it up to you to constantly scan the schedule.

 

[baryon]

Don't know why this was every a problem: The right event is the one that was most recently created. It's that simple!

 

[ARobinson]

I agree. Apple isn't stupid...usually. Lol. And I don't believe anything John Gruber says, but Mac Rumors decided to quote him. At first I thought this was an idiotic theory till I read from his post directly. Not the first time MacRumors is confusing people by leaving out half the story.

 

[ssdeg7]

iCloud still has some problems that I think Apple isn't going to solve, like sometimes it duplicates all of my events, that's really annoying!

 

[Azathoth]

People worrying about whether iCloud can possibly know which is "the truth" are not seeing the wider aim of Apple, which is to eliminate the possibility of conflicts happening at all.

Dave Bowman: Add a lunch meeting on Weds to iCal.
iPad: I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.
Dave Bowman: What's the problem?
iPad: I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.

 

[Azathoth]

The bit you're missing is that with iCloud, when you book something yourself it automatically gets pushed to the calendar your secretary sees, so she never adds a conflicting appointment in the first place. The pervasive concurrency of data is going to stop a lot of these conflicts happening, so the process of resolving them is required less often, and eventually becomes unnecessary.

People worrying about whether iCloud can possibly know which is "the truth" are not seeing the wider aim of Apple, which is to eliminate the possibility of conflicts happening at all.

The scenario is trivial when there is a constant data connection due to the relatively short sync delay compared to the long time for a person to add an appt.

The problem occurs when one or more of the units is not able to sync - that's when conflicts can occur and in this case a simple "last edit date" would not suffice. The boss wants to make sure that the appts they schedule override those made by their sec. even if the sec has performed an edit at a later time than the boss.

 

[atopos]

A propos...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEEwmpScMp4&feature=youtu.be

 

[MattInOz]

How will I know that one of my syncs didn't result in "the truth" so I need to check my versioning?

Seeing the developer of the app that put your info in the cloud is always responsible for presenting your data then its their job to tell you about the conflict. So I'd guess apple does what it can with what the developer tells them about the info. Creates versions out of the rest which the developer needs to either deal with. Hopefully the last resort is bugging the user.

 

[Sora]

I will have to see this work in real time to make my judgement. Sounds like it can be tricked to push the incorrect info to all devices.

 

[Baumi]

I'm not going to put too much faith into this.

To me, Jon Gruber is the Apple equivalent off all the political talk-radio pundits out there: No matter the facts of any particular story, he'll always try to spin them to make it seem like Apple is in the right, knows best for you and has the best products on the planet. (Kind of stuck in the defensive mode of the mid-1990s when Apple was down and almost out in spite of good products.)

So when he talks about any great new Apple product, I'll take it with more than one grain of salt.

 

[econgeek]

Gruber is full of it. He doesn't even understand enough computer science to know WTF he is talking about.

You can use vector clocks to determine which is the "right" one, when you've got devices that are reguarly syncing. But when two devices go offline, and both change the same information, and then come online, you either have the "first one to connect wins" or the "last one to connect wins" because the vector clocks will show both changed while offline from the past common one.

iCloud does not provide any mechanism for basic support of vector clocks right now, this is all left up to the developer.

ARN, I know you have a crush on Gruber, but you have to start recognizing that he's just pulling stuff out of his ass most of the time.

It is pathetic how people fall for this from him time and again.... and of course, nobody goes back and notices when he gets it wrong.

 

[econgeek]

I'm not going to put too much faith into this.

To me, Jon Gruber is the Apple equivalent off all the political talk-radio pundits out there: No matter the facts of any particular story, he'll always try to spin them to make it seem like Apple is in the right, knows best for you and has the best products on the planet. (Kind of stuck in the defensive mode of the mid-1990s when Apple was down and almost out in spite of good products.)

So when he talks about any great new Apple product, I'll take it with more than one grain of salt.

You're right. Gruber is the Michael Savage of the Apple scene. He's equally full of junk when it comes to politics as well, where he's the Michael Savage of the left.

 

[haravikk]

I think that erring towards the most recent change is by far the simplest, and most reliable way to do this, as any other criteria will usually be unreliable. For example; with iBooks, using the highest page might not be right as a user might flick back to re-read a chapter, for example.

I'm hoping for some kind of GUI support though, so that if you have a calendar appointment (for example) that appears to have a conflict, then a badge will display the number of conflicting versions, so if you've got the wrong one you can click to make sure you get the right one from the right source; i.e - if you remember that you changed the appointment on your iPhone after receiving a call, but then when you got to your offline computer you tried to update it and got the details wrong, then you can switch back to the iPhone's version.

 

[mave1969]

iCloud canot possibly know how to mesh any conflicts in my syncing better than I do.

In fact the more I read about Lion and iCloud the more I want to hang onto Snow Leopard.

I suggest you read a bit more. Apple isn't claiming that iCloud will know better than you. The aim is for changes to your data to be pushed to your devices instantly so that the conflicts don't occur in the first place.

If they do occur, then you will be able to review the changes and select the correct version.

 

[tigres]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8C148 Safari/6533.18.5)

I like it. Being a heavy user of MM, this sync conflict is a PITA, especially when you use a lapytop, home, and work machine. They are always overdoing each other.

 

[supmango]

How will I know that one of my syncs didn't result in "the truth" so I need to check my versioning?

I always default to the mobile me cloud anyway, because most of the time it is correct (seriously close to 99% of the time). It is not worth my time to go through every conflict and make sure it is syncing the correct one. Apple is just doing by default what I do anyway.

 

[supmango]

I`m not digging this.

iCloud canot possibly know how to mesh any conflicts in my syncing better than I do.

In fact the more I read about Lion and iCloud the more I want to hang onto Snow Leopard.

I'd suggest you wait to adopt it and see what happens. I will wait at least 6 months before I adopt Lion on most of my machines, except maybe one that I use at home. There will be bugs to work out, there always are when you introduce "new" features. But you should realize that *most* of these features aren't all that new (iOS), they are just being applied in new places (Lion). So I suspect any bugs that do arise will be squashed pretty quickly.

 

[pubwvj]

It is truly unfortunate that Apple's software engineers aren't smart enough and that Apple doesn't have enough money or resources to make features like iCloud and folders available on older iOS machines and older Macs. If they did they would dramatically increase their market for these new updates and services. I, and a lot of other people, are not going to throw away our older hardware just to get these features. Apple is promoting waste. Such a shame. They could make money by selling me Lion that runs on all older Macs and newer iOS on older iDevices. Sure, it would not have some features because the hardware literally can't support them but there are a lot of features they're offering in the new OS that could be supported on the old hardware with ease. That would mean more money every year for Apple as long time users pay for the upgraded OSs.

 

[supmango]

Don't know why this was every a problem: The right event is the one that was most recently created. It's that simple!

Exactly. The conflict resolution screen only appears when it is not certain that it can determine what time you made the change in one or more places, thus which one occurred most recently. Why can't it make this determination? I don't have a clue except for possibly delays in syncing. But it sounds like Apple is pretty confident that they have the cloud notification process working near 100% efficiently, so it should not be an issue for most people going forward. We will see. If not, this new process could pose an issue.

 

[Just "Vinnie"]

Cool—just like iOS spell-checking: most of the time you DO want the auto-correction, so that’s a sensible default. But you can then revert easily if it turns out to be wrong.

The problem is... you may not know it's wrong until it's too late.


And regarding autocorrect... I'd rather live with the shame of a misspelled word rather than a missed appointment.

 

[kalsta]

People can rubbish the source of this information, but it makes sense to me. Sure, there are going to be rare occasions where two users make conflicting changes while both offline — but 99% of the time, well-written software should be able to work out what's what, rather than present you with a confirmation message every time. It's the Apple way not to get in the user's way. If you enjoy having to babysit your computer as it constantly asks for confirmations, try Windows instead.

if iCloud automatically picks the conflict that has more details and a more recent modified date then i have no problem with this.

More details? No. Often you want to delete information. We were running a third-party desktop app for a while which supposedly used Apple's sync services (because I couldn't see the sense in paying for MobileMe) and one of the most annoying things was when you deleted a contact's old email address or something, only to have it pop back when you synced up with others again. Pretty soon you end up with a friend's Address Book entry listing every bloody phone number and email address they ever owned, and you're constantly having to work out which is the most recent one.

 

[radiogoober]

It is truly unfortunate that Apple's software engineers aren't smart enough and that Apple doesn't have enough money or resources to make features like iCloud and folders available on older iOS machines and older Macs. If they did they would dramatically increase their market for these new updates and services. I, and a lot of other people, are not going to throw away our older hardware just to get these features. Apple is promoting waste. Such a shame. They could make money by selling me Lion that runs on all older Macs and newer iOS on older iDevices. Sure, it would not have some features because the hardware literally can't support them but there are a lot of features they're offering in the new OS that could be supported on the old hardware with ease. That would mean more money every year for Apple as long time users pay for the upgraded OSs.

You don't get it. Part of what makes an OS (Windows, Apple, *nix, whatever) suck is having to support legacy hardware. It's a bold move to release an OS and say "Sorry, some old software and hardware will no longer work." But that's how the OS improves and advances. You can't get great new features if you're trying to have infinite backwards compatibility. You gotta pay to play. Sorry if you're too poor to buy new hardware, but you can't expect to use your decade old hardware AND get all the new bells and whistles. iCloud is "free", but you have to at least be using hardware that supports it.

Pretty lame of you to insult Apple (too poor, not smart enough) simply because you don't understand technology progression.

 

[Compile 'em all]

I`m not digging this.

iCloud canot possibly know how to mesh any conflicts in my syncing better than I do.

In fact the more I read about Lion and iCloud the more I want to hang onto Snow Leopard.

You sound like an old fart.