Comment by Capt-RogerOver | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Capt-RogerOver | Hacker News Reader

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I'm a relatively avid software user and I'm having a hard time agreeing that lacking such features is a big problem. I have almost never thought that I would need such a feature, and haven't heard anyone else lack it.

My point is that it's very understandable that such possibility would be useful for some people, and that they would very much like that workflow. It's just that if they are a minority - the industry will not prioritize such development, and it's a good thing. This means that they will develop more needed features.

In a way, everything you describe already exists in the form of Web Apps. Log into Gmail on your PC, do some things there, then switch to an iPad and open the same address there. - voilà you have same app on multiple devices. It will even sync flawlessly...

Regarding file sharing - I can only speak for the technologies that I've been using personally, but both Samba, Dropbox, FTP, SFTP bluetooth filesharing and bluetooth sound have all been working amazingly great for me... It seems like a perfect example of a developed and implemented standard which most devices agree on. What am I doing wrong?

> My point is that it's very understandable that such possibility would be useful for some people, and that they would very much like that workflow. It's just that if they are a minority - the industry will not prioritize such development, and it's a good thing. This means that they will develop more needed features.

I disagree this is a good thing. IT is an extreme example of the fact that people don't know what they want until you show it to them. For all you can tell, seamless transfer of files between multiple devices could be a feature people wouldn't imagine living without if they had it. But you can't explain mass complains about lack of such features because people have stuff to do, and they adapt their workflows to the capabilities of the tools they know - not the other way around.

Doesn't Dropbox achieve exactly that, and in almost the perfect way possible? But yes I get your point, there are surely some areas for which no good solutions exist yet and users don't know that it would be very useful.

Dropbox is great (I've been a happy user for many, many years, and for the last year I've been also a paying happy user). But it solves a different problem - the problem of keeping your files accessible between many machines. Machines you own. The problem of direct file transfer, aka. "I want this file to get from this device to that device (any device - whether mine or my friend's) as fast as possible" remains unsolved.

That's not true, it used to exist in the form of FolderSync, a productized version of Microsoft's SyncToy, which later became part of the Windows Live brand (IIRC as Windows Live Sync.)

Then it went away and never came back. Why? Because Microsoft released OneDrive, a DropBox-like cloud storage system, and the 100% free FolderSync was a competitor to it. Microsoft can make money selling OneDrive, they can't make money selling FolderSync, so it's gone.

Basically, the product you're lamenting doesn't exist used to exist, but no longer does because nobody can make money from it.

I used to use FolderSync to exchange multi-gigabyte video files with my friends while we were doing video editing, and it was an amazing awesome product. It was dead-easy to set up, traversed NAT and firewalls without any troubles, maxed-out whatever internet connection it had access to, and used the LAN connection if possible. Now we'll never see anything like it again.

... anyway, TLDR: the problem doesn't "remain unsolved", it was solved but is now no longer solved.

Dropbox solves entirely different problem - it's my files stored on someones else machine.

Seamless transfer among my machines only is a different problem.

Bittorrent sync?

Or SparkleShare, which is essentially a Dropbox clone backed by git. IIRC it doesn't use anybody else's servers

You're right and wrong. You're right in that people don't know what they want. But you're wrong that industry doesn't give it to them - in this case, Dropbox did, and we (techies) said "why would you want that, you can just [X, Y, Z]?" while regular people flocked to it because it was just so much better.

Sure, it didn't include direct LAN sync to begin with (it does now), but that's the kind of "perfect is the enemy of good" implementation detail that the vast majority of people couldn't care less about.

Yeah, I meant mostly to convey that part you say I'm right about :). I.e. I believe that a lot of useful tools appear because some people want to solve a problem for themselves, and only then others discover the value in it.

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