New in version 1.4.66 — sync status messages and symbols
From Thortspace version 1.4.66 and upwards, status messages and symbols on the sphere swatch now indicate when syncing your most recent sphere saves to the cloud service is pending or complete.
Background Information, in case you’re interested.
(If you’re not interested don’t worry about it — you don’t need to know this, and everything is fine ! )
In case you didn’t know, when you save a sphere in the Thortspace App, the sphere is initially saved to a “local cache” — a space on your device memory or desktop harddrive. This situation is the same whether you are “Local Only” user (you don’t log in at all), a Free Thortspace Account user, or a Thortspace Premium Subscriber. The Thortspace App always [* see superscript note below] saves your changes (when you execute a Save) to your local device or desktop computer hardrive.
Once a Save command has been executed, in the case of Free Thortspace Account Users and Thortspace Premium Service Account users, the Thortspace App syncs your local changes with the Thortspace Cloud Service which is provided for you with your Thortspace Account.
In this way, the Thortspace Cloud Service is able to keep all the copies of a given sphere the same as each other, and as much as possible and, as is judged sensible by the software, to merge together any changes from offline copies on devices that subsequently become reconnected.
In previous versions of Thortspace, this syncing process was regularly executing, so as to keep all the versions of any given sphere consistent with each other, however there was no explicit display of this fact provided to users about when the syncing was being carried out, on which spheres it was pending, or when the syncing had completed.
We judged this lack of explicit information about the syncing process to be inadequate, and so we have now provided explicit indications in the Thortspace UI, so as to inform users when syncs between your local cache and the cloud service and pending, and when they have completed.
* Superscript note:
When I say above that the Thortspace App “always saves your changes to your local device or desktop computer harddrive”, there is one exception to this, that for completeness and clarity’s sake I will mention, but don’t worry about it, if the above was already too much information.
If you are in a realtime collaboration session with another Thortspace user, only one of your computers or devices is the session “host” at any given time. In this situation, only the host of the realtime collaboration session is able to save the sphere you are collaborating on. Consequently all the other users who are in the collaboration session will initially be sending any changes they make on the sphere to the device or computer of the host, not to their local cache.
