If I clip a web page on my iPad Pro to DTTG3, I get no sync at all until I reopen DTTG3. After opening DTTG3 the clipped page appears in a few seconds in the inbox. But then, without manually starting sync on iCloud, it took 1:37:33 minutes for the sync to transfer the file to DTP3 on my iMac. Both DTTG3 and DTP3 are set to “automatic” sync.
If I clip the same web page on my iPad Pro to Keep It, I don’t have to reopen the Keep It app and the file syncs on iCloud with Keep It on my iMac in about 2-3 seconds.
Am I doing something wrong here, or is sync with DTTG3 really that awkward and slow?
BTW I found that if I have split windows set up with Safari and DTTG3, then at least the clip shows up in DTTG3, but still takes a minute+ to sync to DTP3 on my iMac. Surely it’s not intended to work this way, where the DTTG3 window has to be open to accept a clip and sync??
Why would a company make it’s sync slower “by design?” And it doesn’t really address the question of the huge gap in sync speed both directions to say “Keep It isn’t doing the same thing technologically.”
And what about the issue that the web clip won’t even register on DTTG3 unless the app window is open, so you either have to use a split screen or go and open DTTG3 to get it to sync at all? Is that also “by design?”
Sync isn’t “slower by design”. As has been discussed before on the forums, sync runs on an interval for better performance and also to minimize network noise. It runs between 30-45 seconds after a saved change and approx. every 4.5 minutes on idle.
DEVONthink is not doing a simple file sync like other simpler apps, i.e., putting a file in iCloud Drive and letting iCloud sync between devices…
I’m not sure what you’re referring to regardign web clipping.
And in iOS, DEVONthink To Go can make use of Background App Refresh when iOS allows it. iOS controls this and terminates the process as it sees fit.
Whether you don’t want to call it “slower by design” or not, the result of a design which only runs sync at 30-45 second intervals results in much slower sync than any other program I have used to sync between my iMac and my iPad. Semantics don’t matter here; it’s the overall speed (of lack of it) of sync that matters.
If iOS only allows capured data to be sent to an app that is not open on the screen “when iOS allows it,” then it’s interesting that all of the other programs I share data between on iOS never seem to have this issue. Ulysses, Drafts, Keep It, etc. should all suffer equally from this issue, but they don’t. Seems a bit odd if that’s the explanation for a consistent issue only with DTTG3 doesn’t it?
That’s the problem with Schrödinger’s cat: When you look at it, you know if it’s alive or not. But as long as you don’t look, it is both.
To put it differently: How would you know if an app syncs while it is not open on the screen? The only time when you can see that it has synced is when you open it… (I’m talking about i*OS here, not MacOS – with the latter, you could at least try to have a look in the internals of programs and their files).
The way you can know is to sit in front of your Mac and iPad, send a file to DTTG3, then without opening the DTTG3 app, you wait and see if it syncs to the Mac. I’ve done this a number of times with other apps that sync between iPad and Mac and they have all synced to the Mac (almost immediately) without having to open the app on the iPad. I have not seen this happen once with the 15+ times I have tested the same process with DTTG3. In my experience, it will only sync to my Mac if the DTTG3 app is opened on my iPad after sending a file to it from another app on the iPad. When I do this it always syncs, although rather slowly.
Again, the mechanisms are not the same, so it’s not apples-to-apples. It’s likely the capture for the other apps are directly going to an iCloud Drive location, making it accessible in the Mac app. However, you have no proof if the file is present in the iOS app unless you open it - Schrödinger’s cat once more.
