On Apple’s plans for document storage and
personal sharing
Craig Grannell is a writer, designer,
occasional musician and permanent loudmouth. He’s owned Macs since 1996, when
Apple was facing certain doom, and is therefore pleasantly surprised by its
current success. Find Craig on Twitter at Craiggrannell.
Unsurprisingly, given my Mac ownership and
the fact I write about all things Apple for various publication, I trawl the
Mac App Store on a semi-regular basis. Although I still use other ways to
discover software I might find interesting (such as Twitter, MacUpdate, and,
obviously, superb psychic powers), the Mac App Store’s curation-oriented bent
is helpful in filtering the insanely large number of apps available for the
platform.
Apple, trying to be increasingly
accommodating, also often provides themed pages on the store, such as ‘retro
games’ and ‘apps for photographers’. One such page that recently caught my eye
was ‘better together’. The badge on the store’s home page looked rather like an
Apple advert, or the results of my office after someone with OCD had done a
tidy up: a Mac, iPhone and iPad were face-on, against a white background. A
click provided a list of apps that showcased three different kinds of
communication between Apple devices: ‘pair and control’, sync and iCloud.
Each of these offers a different kind of
thinking when it comes to the relationship between iOS and the Mac. The first –
pair and control – assumes (for relevant apps) an iOS device is an accessory
and secondary to a Mac. But the others were all about working with data across
various devices, in a seamless manner. Some of the apps – for example, Reeder
(a Google Reader client) and Evernote – clearly rely on existing and well-known
cloud-based systems to feed data to local clients. However, it was interesting
to see Apple leading its page with iCloud. The selection of compatible products
was small, but along with Apple’s own photography apps (iPhoto, Aperture), it
included DJ controller djay, graphics app SketchBook Pro and writing tool iA
Writer.
With iCloud ‘officially’ arriving on OS X
as of Mountain Lion, I can only image this selection of apps will be much, much
bigger in a year’s time, and I’m not sure how I feel about that. Having data
easily accessible, no matter what device you’re using and where you are, is
clearly a major plus, and I’ve increasingly fallen for Dropbox over the past
few years. But I’m also a slave to the file system, which is clearly something
Apple’s trying to do away with, replacing it with an app-specific flat
‘gallery’ of documents, with relatively limited iOS-style folders for
collections of items. Assuming iCloudd is robust (and, given my experience with
iCal, that’s not a given), being able to pick up a document on a new device
where you left off on a different one will be a boon. But really, iClould’s
going to have to be more than merely robust – spectacular, even – to convince
me to ditch the traditional app-agnostic file system and Dropbox.
App of the fortnight: xScope
Although the Mac App Store hasn’t quite
followed the iOS equivalent’s race to the bottom regarding pricing, many of the
niche apps a re pretty cheap; it therefore comes as a bit of a shock when you
discover one costing $30 that’s essentially just for ‘measuring stuff’ on your
screen. But that’s xScope, and it’s utterly fantastic. It boasts various rulers
and guides, including one that automatically and intelligently finds the
dimensions of on-screen elements, and there’s also a basic app for firing
windows to iOS devices. For the home Mac user banging out the odd letter in
Pages, there’s no value here, but for any jobbing designer, xScope will pay for
itself within a day or two at the most. Find out more about the app at
xScopeApp.com
