It's a very simple way to narrow down the dataset I'm looking at. I couldn't live without Spotlight these days, but Spotlight would also be unusable without the ability to restrict it to a certain subset of my data.
Sure, it's old thinking, but it solves a very real problem. no history, no backup because the backup is now trashed. It's so simplistic, you can mess up your data (if the iCloud doesn't do it for you) and it will efficiently mess it up everywhere in an instant. the problem here, again, is in it being a bit too simplistic. With this move, all we have is easy, leaving anyone mastering the system frustrated and impaired.
Apple, historically designed easy ways to do things, while allowing access to more power once the easy was mastered. Ever do a Spotlight search over thousands of documents when you can't come up with specific enough terms? It just doesn't work very well.īut, here's the big thing.
However, at that point, you've probably put in more cognitive work than just learning how to use a file-system. People don't organize by app, they organize by project or some other kind of categorization. If you have hundreds or thousands, the concept falls apart. Yes, if you have a dozen documents, it's easier to just see them directly in an app's interface (not sure about more intuitive, but easier). So, as iPhones and iPads and other appliances bring computing to a broader user base than ever before, the services that bind them remain stuck between the best-ever version of the past, and a still sputtering and stammering future. So could something else, including a new version of Dropbox. It could be the iPad-style car to the old file system truck. ICloud could be that better thing, if Apple can nail it. Those of us used to, and clinging to, traditional file systems love it, and will continue to love it as it becomes marginalized into obsolescence, as the growing mainstream - those who aren't power users but are increasingly empowered users - who won't get it and shouldn't be subjected to it, sweep past it and onto newer, better things. And at the end of the day, that still amounts to the wrong thing. It's a bunch of encrypted data stored on Amazon's S3 network.Īs much as iCloud is the right thing still not realized, Dropbox is the wrong thing done brilliantly well. (Dropbox, it turns out, has also been a bag of hurt for developers for years.)īut here's the thing - for all Dropbox's automagical-ness, it's a relic of the past. It's also being improved on the API side, making it even easier for developers to integrate. It has versioning, it has un-delete, it has selective sync, and it's saved my ass more times than I can count. It's the closest thing I've found, Google Drive and Microsoft SkyDrive be damned, to truly automagical sync.
It's the first thing I install whenever I set up a new Mac. My entire OS X documents folder lives in Dropbox. Worst case, we're all in for a lot of pain and turbulence as they struggle to figure it out.Īnd that's in stark contrast to something like Dropbox, which enjoys about as much popularity on iOS as can be afforded a third-party service. While Google, Facebook, and Amazon can snap up developers and designers and push out better looking and working apps, it's hard to imagine a plucky startup Apple could buy - much less a NeXT-level acquisition Apple could make - to jumpstart their services talent and technology the way they did their local operating system over a decade and a half ago.īest case, Apple has secretly been working on something as important to the next generation of online services as WebObjects was to the last.