
Show HN: Sync Done Beautifully - lominming
https://www.pixelapse.com/sync
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anonova
The landing page loads a whopping 6 MB of assets, the culprits particularly
being two images at 3.2 and 1.8 MB. It was definitely not a fun experience on
my lowly mobile network connection.

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jrockway
Products can be beautiful and delightful, but I'm not sure it's meaningful
when you call your own product beautiful and delightful.

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solipsism
Meaningful, maybe not. Having a desirable marketing effect? Probably.

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avemg
I don't know about that. It's certainly becoming a trite way to describe your
product.

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whiddershins
This sounds incredible, obviously the details are everything. Would be nice to
see a comparison to other solutions, and an explanation of how infinite
storage is possible/economical.

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shravan
Hey, one of the founders of Pixelapse here. For context, our target
demographic is graphic designers.

We initially started out with tiered pricing based on storage. However, based
on usage, we actually found that people rarely hit their storage caps. A
better barometer for us is the number of people working together, which we
approximate with projects. In that regard, our pricing plans are similar to
Github's. Public projects are free and unlimited. Private projects are paid.

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solipsism
What products would you say are comparable to yours? Perforce comes to mind,
though that's more of a "check out, check in" model, where this appears to be
more of a dropbox model?

I'm not understanding how a version is identified, though. Is a version stored
on the server every time the file is saved?

I don't see anything about locking. How do you prevent two people from working
on the same unmergeable file at the same time?

Speaking of merging, there is no mention of merging of text files. Is that not
supported?

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shravan
I'd say the model is most comparable to Dropbox in that it passively syncs
your work in the background. The check-in, check-out approach works for
developers but we found it to be too confusing for our target audience of
designers. It's a bit of cognitive overhead to remember to constantly check-
in, especially when using Photoshop, which crashes quite frequently.

Every save forms a new version online, but you can go back and retroactively
mark certain versions as major milestones. Milestones are roughly equivalent
to commits in Git.

Since we're primarily focused on graphic design formats, we don't attempt to
do any merging of files since it's unclear that the end product would make
much sense. We don't lock files either. If two users simultaneously edit the
same file, one of them "loses" and shows up as a Conflicted copy that you can
visually resolve in the Comparison view online.

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solipsism
_If two users simultaneously edit the same file, one of them "loses" and shows
up as a Conflicted copy._

From my perspective, that seems like a good feature to consider adding. Groups
of artists are used to self-organizing so they don't end up conflicting in
this way, but I think that's only because they haven't had tools to solve the
problem for them. We're rolling Perforce out enterprise-wide, and trying to
convince artists to start storing their working files in it (PSDs, etc) -- one
of the big selling points is that you can easily see that someone else is
working on this file before you jump in.

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snowpalmer
How is Sketch file support? When we've tried to share files via Dropbox it's
constantly stepping on each others toes just when someone tries to open it for
view-only. Makes collaboration difficult between a designer and a developer.

*Sketch files are actually folders with data, previews, etc. The act of opening the file actually modifies things like the thumbnail.

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lominming
You are right that Sketch files (up till version 3.0.4) are actually file
packages, but we support packages so it shows up as files online. This is the
same as OmniGraffle and Keynote files which are actually folders. We have
build our syncing technology to differentiate folders and package files.

Sketch just officially launched 3.1 two days ago which creates files that are
actually single files. We can still support version control for these files,
but we are working on fixing the preview generation for the new Sketch format.

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RankingMember
"Hand-crafted in California". Is this Silicon Valley fetishism really still
going on? It's like the "made on a Mac" of the '10s.

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tankenmate
Now that Adobe will be supporting ChromeOS; will Pixelapse support it as well?

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michaelmior
Is the icon supposed to have a psb extension? It looks like a typo.

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shravan
Nop, it's a reference to Photoshop's Large Document Format. [1]

[1]: [http://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/using/file-
formats.html#lar...](http://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/using/file-
formats.html#large_document_format_psb)

~~~
michaelmior
Cool. It's been a while since I've used Photoshop on a regular basis, so I'm
out of the loop. It just seemed odd given that psd is used directly underneath
the icon.

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michaelbuddy
Since I've know about it, I've liked the extension because in .PSB, the B is
for big.

