Suggestions after Trying Version 1.0000000

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1

Other readers have noted that the release of DTTG was very premature. Having spent the afternoon beating my head against a wall, my recommendation would be to issue a Stop-use-for-now plea, to work rapidly toward a better release, to beg forgiveness (it will be granted by most loyal DT users), and to proceed thereafter with the lessons learned. If the time gap isn’t too great, you wouldn’t need to give refunds, but that is an option as well. Sorry to be so blunt. Objectively, I wasted my $15. However, I have faith that all will be well before TOO long. DT products have been very impressive in the past.

Now, I may have had some different experiences than others, so I will list them here to add to your list.

  1. VPN. It is possible that my initial failures were because of having my laptop connected by VPN to my corporate network. I never saw anything to indicate sychronization on the DTTG side. Or maybe I just got lost in other issues. Anyway, I quit the VPN, restarted, and spent the rest of the afternoon on a garden-variety public network. Still, I’d add VPN issues to your possible-cause-of-troubles list. It’s caused troubles for me on other occasions.

  2. NAVIGATION. Except possibly for teenage iPhone users, not everything Apple does is intuitive. Navigation on the iPad can be confusing and even treacherous. The DTTG app should do its best to make navigation intuitive and the getting-started information should have big-enough-to-read pictures and icons in text. What does the home pane look like (it seems to be a pane, not a full window)? How do you get there? What does the sync button look like and where is it to be found? It was a LONG time before I found i). A core problem is that if you open an iPad app, you find yourself on the last page visited, which is good, but only if you know how to get home. Since many folks will read getting-started initially, and then find themselves on that page with no clear navigation methods, there is a problem immediately. How do they get home?

Example: just now (after getting things working), I opened DTTG again. It opened to “No Document Selected.” There are no tool bars. It’s not intuitive that one would click on the Global Inbox (the only button) and then, at the bottom of the resulting pane, see a few icons, one of which is the little house. To get to the sync options, one has to click the house (going home, a normal icon), and then–and only then apparently–does one see the synch wheel (a normal icon, to be sure). Until I finally got there, I was clicking everywhere, thinking that maybe the various icons at the top were the sync button, etc (a flag, an exclamation mark, etc.).

Example 2. For awhile, I was seemingly trapped looking at a Google Earth map of my neighborhood. How could I escape? Again, clicking on Global Inbox wasn’t exactly intuitive. It’s a terrible interface.

  1. SYNCHING. I didn’t see anything in the instructions about having to enter a PIN number, which requires having the iPad and the Mac visible at the same time, or something more complicated. It’s hardly intuitive, although it’s easy enough. It then takes awhile to “take” and there needs to be a progress bar during that period because it seems as though things are frozen until, finally, the page rotates.

  2. WHAT IS TO BE SYNCHED. For reasons I don’t understand, my initial synching was of Global Inbox, which had a bunch of stuff (and a lot of MB). That caused trouble in itself and I didn’t intend to sync it. If it was done by default, that’s a bad idea. To make things worse, the list of possible things to be synched was grayed out except for Global Inbox. For awhile, I interpreted that as meaning that I couldn’t sync the others. It turns out, that being grayed out is like “off” in a toggle switch. By clicking on the item I wanted to sync, all was well, but that wasn’t standard UI design.

  3. DISCONNECTING AND TRASHING. Maybe there is a serious trap. I say maybe because I don’t have time to go through and do experiments. However, if one has put some important files in the Synch box in DTPO (as distinct from using CMD-OP to copy them, I guess), then it’s not clear to me how one deletes those for synchronization purposes without losing the files forever. I had gotten so paranoid at that point in my adventures that I made copies before proceeding. As a minimum, this needs to be gorilla-proofed and clearly described. Suppose one HAS used CMD-OPTION when putting a file or group into the Sync Group. What is and is not synchronized?
    I’ll figure that out next time, but I’m tired out.

  4. APPARENT BUGS. Others have mentioned many of these. One is that, right now, I’m looking at a top pane saying Please select a computer…" There is also an option for Reset Synchronization settings. The Cancel button doesn’t work; nothing seems to work. It appears that the thing to do is to lean for awhile on Reset until the demand for the PIN appears again. Then all is well again, temporarily. None of this should have happened. That is, it had been working earlier, so why was it no longer working? There should also be progress bars, warnings when closing and reopening, resetting sync, or using the app’s reset feature are needed, etc.

  5. FEATURES. As others have noted, there’s not much value currently compared to just doing DropBox or some such. I can’t edit a Word document and to mark up a pdf I’d have to spend another $15 for iAnnotate, which I might possibly do but wish were not necessary. Perhaps if my document were written in Pages or Keynote, I could do something, but I’m not sure about that. Explanation? Way ahead?

Good luck. I believe that the iPad is the start of a whole new era and am looking forward to using it increasingly on trips, without lugging along my MacBook Pro. Things aren’t there yet, however.

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I did further experiments today. I expected immediate success, since I’d succeeded eventually yesterday, but I had another long sequence of problems. Some notes for information:

  1. MyDevices gave goofy information on my iPad. It saw my laptop, but listed it twice and claimed it was a printer (a printer at my office, to which I am not even connected). It showed the right IP address, however, and also my wife’s iMac. Thus, Bonjour is working. So, caution in suggesting use of the app.

  2. Reaction time with DTTG is often quite long (many seconds), but sometimes brief. This is very very confusing, especially without feedback.

  3. Is it necessary to “lean on” the name of the computer, or the reset command, or both, until something happens? Sometimes it seemed as though “leaning” was necessary; other times, nothing ever happened.

  4. Sometimes, I make it through the pairing easily, with the “door turning”; sometimes, things hang up before the number disappears from the laptop. What’s going on then? Sometimes I would get messages about continuation being dangerous because app would be unstable; sometimes I’d see the device time-out message. I spent a lot of time trying various resets.

  5. I did, however, succeed eventually in synchronizing a file, adding another file to the synch group, resynchronizing, etc. One was an rtf file; one was a pdf. Both were readable on the iPad.

  6. Losing files. I believe that the mechanism should allow: (1) decide on a file or group to be synched; (2) apply a tag that causes this to happen; (3) decide to quit synching the file by removing that tag. As far as I can tell currently, the only way to quit synching is to trash the contents of the sync group on the Mac. Doing so trashes the original file if the item is a replicant. If the file is a copy, then it seems necessary to copy that (with a new name) back to the original DT group before trashing. Else it will be lost when synching is turned “off”. If I am correct on this, the design is going to cause tired people to lose essential files–and perhaps even their earlier drafts int he same folder/group.

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Thanks for the comments.

Mike Papp has indicated plans to provide more feedback during the sync process. Most of the time, sync has peen pretty straightforward for me, but when my Mac and iPad are some distance from my regular WiFi router the signal becomes weaker and I’ve also experienced needing to try several times before sync starts up. In such a case, I switch the network connection to one created by my host Mac, and that makes a more robust WiFi signal connecting the two devices. And yes, I would like a progress bar or similar feedback.

Some of the navigation issues you mentioin are the result of Apple’s conventions as to how navigation should be done. But there’s room for improvement here, or at least more documentation for the new user – especially one not used to Apple’s conventions in iOS. DT To Go’s navigation features are much like those of Mail on the iPad – I’ll confess I’m mot completely in love with the way Mail operates on the iPad. :slight_smile:

The FAQs document several issues, such as lack of the ability to “file” documents within DT To Go, lack of ability to delete documents, and so on in the initial release. Expect to see enhancements in updates.

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Bill, I don’t believe the problem is weak signal or bandwidth; I’ve got plenty of both at home. I’ve not tried broadcasting from my laptop (I’ve even forgotten how, it’s been so long), and can try that, but that’s not something that people will want to bother with.

I agree with you on Apple’s navigation conventions.

By the way, I was impressed last night placing with iAnnotate. It probably has glitches, but it’s am impressive app.