[Warning: this is one of the geekier posts I’ve written in a little while. If the words “sync” and “cloud” bore you to tears, might I recommend an older, simpler piece of mine which discusses the merits of drawing sheep on your touchscreen.]
“Sync on exit” doesn’t really sound terribly exciting, but it has become one of my favourite features in my productivity apps, especially since I spend so much time and energy thinking about how to keep my data synced across my iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Appigo’s ToDo and Guided Ways’ 2Do are great examples of the niche set of apps that are intelligent enough to synchronize your info with the cloud after you press the Home button, and I love them to death for doing so.
When given the option, I prefer to sync on both startup and exit, but if forced to choose, I would definitely stick with “Sync on exit”. Syncing on startup usually means slowing your app down during the sync, or simply making the app unusable for the good 4–5 seconds your data is exchanged wirelessly. Syncing on exit, on the other hand, is always a background process. You press the Home button, effectively quitting the app, and do whatever you want to do, knowing full well your data is syncing automatically in the background. It’s a subtle (and geeky) difference, but I find it’s more useful knowing my recent changes are reflected in the cloud (sync on exit), instead of seeing my most up-to-date data upon launching an app (sync on startup).
However, I’m hoping that iCloud will solve a lot of these issues for us by allowing apps to simply sync their data in the background. If I could tick off a couple of tasks on my iPhone, wait a few seconds, and load 2Do up on my iPad with the recent changes already reflected on-screen, I’d be on cloud nine.
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