We spent a lot, and I mean a lot — as in months, of development time working on a reliable sync solution that would meet our technical requirements, meet our users’ expectations, and protect our users’ critical data from data loss.  Ilaro’s reliance on Apple’s brilliant Core Data technologies has made sync a more challenging problem and, in turn, lengthened the 2.0 development cycle.  Without re-hashing the well-publicized issues developers have faced, let’s just say sync is hard.

The Good News: iCloud and Core Data sync improved with iOS7.  However, the improvements didn’t address all of our concerns and Ilaro’s needs.  Thanks to Drew McCormack and Ensembles, however, those problems have been solved.  Internally we have been testing Ensembles sync via iCloud with no data loss and no unexpected side effects.  This means that soon Ilaro users will be able to seamlessly sync data between iOS devices, as well as with our impending Mac OS X release.

We first conceived of Ilaro with iCloud sync in mind.  And we are very pleased to finally be reaching the point at which we can bring this core feature to our users.

The Not-As-Good News: Due to the size of many of the note libraries our users keep, we can’t quite yet “turn on” sync in Ilaro.  In the coming weeks, Ensembles development will focus on just the optimizations we just happen to need in order to ensure a more reliable and consistent user experience.   The remaining obstacles are minor compared to what developers faced prior to Core Data Ensembles.  For now, we are continuing work on making sure the user experience with sync will be smooth and simple.

So keep an eye out.  Sync is coming.