It seems like only yesterday when Apple released iCloud to the public, ushering in a new paradigm of storage and data management. iCloud, the function that has been woven into both OS X and iOS, transparently makes your apps, data, photos, etc. available to all your devices simultaneously in the background so that no matter which device you’re using you can still get to all your stuff.
Was it a flawless launch? Not really. While the power and feature set of iCloud is inarguable, it’s a leap that stumbled and had hiccups all along the way. Developers spoke with Macstories about how the transition to the iCloud Age has gone for them. There’s some good, some bad, and some ugly… including this tidbit from Philip Goward, founder of Smile.
It is a non-trivial undertaking, when you are dealing with files, folders, and conflicts”, said Smile founder Philip Goward, whose PDF reading and annotation tool, PDFPen, implemented iCloud sync both on the Mac and iOS. “Users really value iCloud storage and find it very useful to share data across devices, as we’ve seen in comments on the App Store and reviews”, Goward explained. “It’s a significant advantage to the user that PDFpen offers this seamless editing experience across both Mac and iPad”. PDFPen for iPad, which came out in January, was one of the first PDF readers for the iPad to take advantage of iCloud to sync a user’s documents back to the Mac. By using a single “My Documents” folder that lives in iCloud, Smile figured out a way to share documents stored in iCloud with the Mac version of the software, which is sold both on the Mac App Store and on Smile’s website. Per Apple’s limitations and APIs, in fact, developers of apps not available on the Mac App Store cannot use iCloud-related technologies.
iCloud isn’t going anywhere any time soon. Apple has bet much of the farm on its integration into the product line, and it’s pretty clear that as the kinks are worked out it will become second nature for users to intuitively work with cloud storage and syncing.
Source: Macstories
