Is there a tool to know when U1 client has finished up/down-loading files?

If you are on lucid

Click MeMenu (the thing with your login name on it) and click "Ubuntu One...." after a while you will see your current usage meter and underneath it you can see "Synchronisation complete"

This not very intuitive or comfortable. I would expect an icon in notification area while sync is in progress. Are you expecting me to pull up the status of sync with a delay of 5-10 sec everytime before I go to standby or shut down my Ubuntu laptop?

I really appreciate UbuntuOne very much. The integration and options are amazing. I just wanted to say that I experience information on the status as very important IF something with UbuntuOne is going on. Shutting down a machine without full sync to UbuntuOne and continuing to work on an older version of a file on another machine will end up in version-conflicts, incomplete backups, etc, etc. It's great to try to hide as much as possible from the users attention, but the user needs at least some status (not a vanishing notification). What about indicating the status of U1 in the MeMenu? That will not draw too much attention of the user, but can be accessed with one click.
"UbuntuOne has finished syncing..."
-> "Great, I can shut down."
or "Oh, I have to wait for at least 15 minutes."
or "Connection was lost. I've to check".

I agree with both Andre comments. I remember a previous version of U1
client, where a pop-up cloud announced when "all sync is done" or
something similar. The latest version stopped to implement this feature.

Ciao
CM

I know this is not ideal but what i like to do when monitoring a sync is run the following command in a Terminal:

tail -fn 50 ~/.cache/ubuntuone/log/syncdaemon.log

> tail -fn 50 ~/.cache/ubuntuone/log/syncdaemon.log
>

Thanks for this hint. But, please, consider that this command generates
a cryptic output which is not plain-English for me (and English is not
my home language). I think that it could be added something to U1client
in order to get, translate and display an equivalent output message from
the syncdaemon.log file.

UbuntuOne is just-another-sharing-storage on the web, but it is "our"
Ubuntu system, and I suppose it could be worth considering to let it be
competitive if compared to some other available (free) systems at least.

Thanks again.
Ciao
CM

There is currently no convienent way to get this status. We are planning on addressing this for the next release, Maverick. The best alternative might be this command in a terminal session: watch --interval=10 'u1sdtool -s && u1sdtool --current-transfers'

This will report the status of Ubuntu One (look for upload/download to be "0" and queues: IDLE to know that Ubuntu One is not currently syncing files).

Thank you,

Joshua