Christiaan:

> If that's what Dropbox does, than there's no way to fix that. When
> the file is deleted there's nothing to follow. We cannot know what
> will happen to a file location in the future, if anything, and we
> can predict even less what the document itself will do, as that's a
> black box. Therefore Skim is conservative, and will not update when
> there can be any doubt, starting from the principle that doing
> things wrongly is worse than not doing things (especially something
> that is non-standard and goes against the system behavior, such as
> this.) The only way to safely follow and update files is if Apple
> would support it, because they are the only ones that know what
> happens in the internals. But they don't.

Thanks for the quick and precise answer.

I learned a little more.

I put a fresh PDF into dropbox on my computer.  The name of the file
was Karplus2011.pdf.  I launched Skim on the file.  I then modified it
on my iPad using goodreader and sync'd back.  Skim showed no change. 
However, when I clicked on Skim, the name of the file on the top of
the window changed to:

/Users/toms/Dropbox/.dropbox.cache/2012-02-23/Karplus2011\ \(deleted\ 
4f46c83f-42dfe-9b2c4738\).pdf 

So apparently the file is not deleted, it is MOVED to the backup cache
that dropbox holds for previous versions of files.  Skim apparently
follows the file into the cache and so no further changes appear.

I can see two solutions (aside from the copy/atchange trick).  One
would be to prevent the backup mechanism from functioning.  It's not
obvious how to do this from the online dropbox documentation.  The
other would be for Skim to keep pointing to the same file location
instead of moving with the file.  Is that easy?

Tom

  Thomas D. Schneider, Ph.D.
  Senior Investigator
  National Institutes of Health
  National Cancer Institute
  Gene Regulation and Chromosome Biology Laboratory
  Molecular Information Theory Group
  Frederick, Maryland  21702-1201
  301-846-5581
  http://alum.mit.edu/www/toms (permanent)

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Cloud computing makes use of virtualization - but cloud computing 
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