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Anyone ready to move 'to the iCloud' ?

Maybe if I used nothing but Apple's apps, but I'm not - so no.

Having tried out at least ten different alternatives, I've come to the conclusion that Dropbox is the best solution for my needs. I'm also using Syncplicity as a form of secondary online backup for certain folders.
 
tkermit said:
Haravikk said:
if you create a new message in Mail and try to attach a file, then it won't see any of the files you know you've stored in iCloud, you have to go back into the app that created it, open the file, and use the share menu to create the e-mail.
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Not true.
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Care to cite a reference on that one? Switching to using spotlight to find the file is not the same as seeing files in the iCloud "tab" that are suitable for attaching; sure going back into the creating app and sharing isn't the quickest route, but it's the only "direct" route to do it due to this crazy segregated documents setup.

Having to leave the proper iCloud interfaces to work around its shortcomings is not intuitive or graceful in the slightest.
 
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I'm happily moving everything I can into iCloud. It all makes perfect sense to me (especially given SSD pricing), and Apple has come a long way since the MobileMe fiasco.
 
Seamaster said:
I'm happily moving everything I can into iCloud. It all makes perfect sense to me (especially given SSD pricing), and Apple has come a long way since the MobileMe fiasco.
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I don't understand your point about SSD pricing. Documents in iCloud take up just as much space on your Mac as local documents. They are still stored locally anyway and mirrored to iCloud. It's not saving you any disk space.
 
I cloud is cool but I like dropbox much better, mainly because dropbox will allow me to add more storage for free. So far I have 21GB of space. However, I will be stuck at 5GB for I-cloud forever.

Rich
 
One thing that I did after my clean install of ML is instead of copying over my iTunes folder, i just enabled iTunes Match on the fresh OS and BOOM! All my songs were available. Pretty neat. Now I just need to copy over my movies, TV shows, books, apps, & ringtones and I'll be good to go.

iTunes in the cloud all day.

Tuck
 
another thing I realised about why I don't think iCloud is good for me right now is internet wise, I don't have fast or stable internet. I ended up having to pay $50 to get enough internet to finish my ML download :rolleyes:

I like it for iPad to other computers. I don't use my ipad for notes too often, but I have previously and I can see that I wwould possibly do so more often if I were syncing easily.
 
steve-p said:
I don't understand your point about SSD pricing. Documents in iCloud take up just as much space on your Mac as local documents. They are still stored locally anyway and mirrored to iCloud. It's not saving you any disk space.
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Because it's not just about documents — I don't have to store my iTunes music library locally (iTunes Match), nor do I have to keep local copies of TV shows or movies purchased in the iTunes Store (stream them straight to my Apple TV). These were the big hard disk eaters, pre-cloud.
 
What planet are you guys living on? Or did I misunderstand the question?

Moving "everything" to the cloud yields the same embarrassment as Chrome OS: when you have no connection and need/want to use your computer to find an important document, what do you do? Finding the nearest wifi-spot isn't an option in many areas on this planet. The same goes for wireless coverage.

We're simply not there yet. I've had 3G as my only home connection for the last five years in a country with fairly good coverage and speed (Sweden btw) and at work it's either tethered or wifi. Still, removing local storage is just not doable (if that is the consequence we're discussing), even in my "well-connected" situation. Having a connection "most of the time" or "wifi is 'everywhere'" (it's not btw) doesn't really cut it.

I need, absolutely need, mobility. I don't necessarily need a connection for every step of my work, however. That is, as long as I have local storage.

It's one thing to not litter your hard drive with everything under the sun and instead just re-download when needed. But quite often I need a document then and there, and if having a connection would be necessary to open a spreadsheet a lot of people could no longer do their jobs reliably. Not everyone is sitting tethered to a desk (and a connection).

With iCloud, there are of course local copies hidden away in the user/library folder (Mobile Documents) but that's hardly transparent. It'd be nice if Apple found better way of exposing that to the user on a surface level. I realize that's exactly what they want to do away with - i.e. the relevant files "should just be there, triggered by context" (e.g. opening a specific app) - but the infrastructure isn't there yet for an online-only model. In fact, I feel we still have a long way to go.

As for when I do have a connection, it works well but we'll need local storage for quite some time still.

In that respect a Dropbox like solution is the better way (call it a stop-gap measure if you want), since you have the local mirror of your online documents exposed to the user. Not as sleek as iCloud of course but Apple could do some interface magic to solve that.

Even Google backpedalled on the no-local-storage thing for their Chrome books.

tl/dr: I'm absolutely *not* ready to move everything to the cloud and I doubt I will be for quite some time.
 
blipmusic said:
Snip
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Even with offline, when you open your App it'll see your local iCloud copy. The whole point of iCloud is to do away with the file system so I'm not sure why you are complaining about transparency, it achieves that aspect pretty well IMO, even though it fails at a lot.
 
I, for one, will NEVER "move to the Cloud".

Some reasons:

- My data is MINE. By that I mean it's private and I don't trust it with others (encryption notwithstanding). Perhaps the "cloud" (and it might be other clouds than Apple's) seems secure -today-. But who's to say that at some point, others may gain access to it? Twenty years ago (and yes, I was sending email then), who would guess that governments (such as the USA) would put into place programs that could scan EVERY piece of email sent in the country? Who's to say that at some point "backdoors" might be built into the clouds that enable government scanning and intrusion, in the name of "national security"?

- It is MY responsibility to maintain the security of my data. I accept it, and realize that I shouldn't rely on others to protect same.

- What happens if the cloud simply disappears without warning, either by accident or intent? What good will your data be, if it's stored there and you can't access it? What happens when the cloud simply "blows away"?
 
I could probably roll with it, but the "apps can't junk with other app's files" thing is kind of a turn off. That along with owning an android phone and not really using my iPad for more than a handoff device really doesn't give any value to the cloud part of iCloud.

Still might be nice for off site backups, but I don't know of any apps that are both iCould capable and involve important enough work that I'd want an off site backup. I might use it just cuz, but I don't know which app I'll be doing that with.
 
JohnDoe98 said:
Even with offline, when you open your App it'll see your local iCloud copy. The whole point of iCloud is to do away with the file system so I'm not sure why you are complaining about transparency, it achieves that aspect pretty well IMO, even though it fails at a lot.
Click to expand...

Ouch, iCloud-only files show up fine on a spotlight search when offline as well. My bad and ignorance. Sorry.

Still, a "file" represents information, an app only enables me to read/edit/manage that information. A plain-text file can be opened by many apps and there are many valid reasons for me to do just that. If I need to search for a specific file I will have to use the current filesystem to somehow trigger a situation that allows me to switch to another app that will read the file in question. A solution like Dropbox works better in that situation.

If there was a 1:1 mapping for mime-type<->app something like iCloud would work fine but that's not a viable situation. Not just because there will sometimes be "read-only" situations (e.g. watch a movie) and sometimes an "edit" situations (edit said movie). But I might for several reasons have a need to relate some mime-types/file-types to others and unfortunately a file-centric system is currently simpler in that respect.

I need control over the data, the apps come later since some might work better than others, depending on the context.

I'm not saying hierarchical file systems are good, I'm just saying that making the border between online and offline invisible while hiding the underlying structure isn't there yet for many reasons.

Online-only is a no-go for may years to come. However, if Apple (or someone else) solve the problems with app-centric systems while managing to remove the barrier between online and offline, my interest will be piqued.
 
Interesting thing actually, I want to use an icloud because of my current setup.
I've been using mbp + external monitor for five years, but now I have an iMac.

all my work is done with the iMac now, and the mbp is used for meeting with clients or do some minor adjustment while on the road. I never could do intensive work with the mbp small screen.

Now synchronizing the two is quite a hassle, but icloud seems to be a solution for this.

All the heavy sync such as graphic files, xcoderproject, etc will be done with rsync on the same network. but for office work such as doc, ppt I will now use icloud with pages and keynote.

It is to early for me to say about reliability, but a step forward for hassle free sync between my two mac's.
 
I would love to store docs and what not in the cloud, but I find no use for it unless apple releases an iWork in the cloud so I can edit these docs at any pc via web browser similar to google docs.
 
So far I haven't done much with iCloud, partly cause I have the things I need to share located in Dropbox. I have my contacts in Yahoo.

No real objections, it's just a lot of hassle to try to move all the Yahoo stuff over.

----------
Fishrrman said:
I, for one, will NEVER "move to the Cloud".

Some reasons:

- What happens if the cloud simply disappears without warning, either by accident or intent? What good will your data be, if it's stored there and you can't access it? What happens when the cloud simply "blows away"?
Click to expand...

A hurricane hitting North Carolina might tear the cloud apart.
 
blipmusic said:
Ouch, iCloud-only files show up fine on a spotlight search when offline as well. My bad and ignorance. Sorry.

Still, a "file" represents information, an app only enables me to read/edit/manage that information. A plain-text file can be opened by many apps and there are many valid reasons for me to do just that. If I need to search for a specific file I will have to use the current filesystem to somehow trigger a situation that allows me to switch to another app that will read the file in question. A solution like Dropbox works better in that situation.

If there was a 1:1 mapping for mime-type<->app something like iCloud would work fine but that's not a viable situation. Not just because there will sometimes be "read-only" situations (e.g. watch a movie) and sometimes an "edit" situations (edit said movie). But I might for several reasons have a need to relate some mime-types/file-types to others and unfortunately a file-centric system is currently simpler in that respect.

I need control over the data, the apps come later since some might work better than others, depending on the context.

I'm not saying hierarchical file systems are good, I'm just saying that making the border between online and offline invisible while hiding the underlying structure isn't there yet for many reasons.

Online-only is a no-go for may years to come. However, if Apple (or someone else) solve the problems with app-centric systems while managing to remove the barrier between online and offline, my interest will be piqued.
Click to expand...

Even if all apps were able to see and open all files that they support, I still wouldn't like it. I often have several different types of files that need to be opened with different apps in the same folder. Continuing on something by finding a folder once then open the files needed is, and will always be, faster, easier and more convenient than having to open the individual apps and having to locate the files ever single time.
 
I think it's more likely your laptop getting stolen and your backup HDD going bad than a mainframe site going down and losing all your cloud data.

It's a risk I'm willing to take.
 
Tankmaze said:
Interesting thing actually, I want to use an icloud because of my current setup.
I've been using mbp + external monitor for five years, but now I have an iMac.

all my work is done with the iMac now, and the mbp is used for meeting with clients or do some minor adjustment while on the road. I never could do intensive work with the mbp small screen.

Now synchronizing the two is quite a hassle, but icloud seems to be a solution for this.

All the heavy sync such as graphic files, xcoderproject, etc will be done with rsync on the same network. but for office work such as doc, ppt I will now use icloud with pages and keynote.

It is to early for me to say about reliability, but a step forward for hassle free sync between my two mac's.
Click to expand...

Thing is, in your scenario Dropbox is still a better solution. You would not have to rsync anything. Dropbox is unique I believe in cloud solutions in that it also does local LAN copies if it can. When you change a file on one computer, other cloud services would have to upload the file to the cloud, and the other computer(s) would have to fetch them back again over the Internet, which is slow. Dropbox is clever enough to notice if a computer needs a file and it can be found on another computer on the LAN. So when you saved a file on your iMac, it would instantly and automatically sync to the MBP. if you happened to make a change on your MBP, it would sync back again and update the iMac. And you get the benefit of an off-site copy of everything too. I work on 3 different machines and all are kept in sync all the time without doing anything. It's more Apple-like than the Apple solution to me. It's free up to a point, too.
 
steve-p said:
Thing is, in your scenario Dropbox is still a better solution. You would not have to rsync anything. Dropbox is unique I believe in cloud solutions in that it also does local LAN copies if it can. When you change a file on one computer, other cloud services would have to upload the file to the cloud, and the other computer(s) would have to fetch them back again over the Internet, which is slow. Dropbox is clever enough to notice if a computer needs a file and it can be found on another computer on the LAN. So when you saved a file on your iMac, it would instantly and automatically sync to the MBP. if you happened to make a change on your MBP, it would sync back again and update the iMac. And you get the benefit of an off-site copy of everything too. I work on 3 different machines and all are kept in sync all the time without doing anything. It's more Apple-like than the Apple solution to me. It's free up to a point, too.
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It's a great feature, which is why Dropbox isn't the only solution to employ it ;) Other services can even separate LAN sync and online sync, meaning very large files or "secret" files can still be synced in your office (between your three computers) whilst not taking up any space online.
 
I have made the move to iCloud from DropBox, but I'm not sure I will stay there. I am a Pages and Numbers user so figured I'd give it a try but I have had some issues. Earlier I couldn't open any Numbers files on my Mac for a long time. All I would get was the spinning beach ball. Not sure what was wrong because it eventually cleared up. Then I notice the document conversion between Mac and IOS is not seamless. I still get error messages on my iPad that certain attributes will be lost. I guess I'm trying to decide what I am getting out of using iCloud Documents over DropBox other than easier file transfer back to my Mac after updating a file on my iPad. Since I don't do this very often, I'm not so sure it's worth it. I am still using DropBox for my non-Pages and Numbers files including all my PDF's because IOS doesn't have a corresponding Preview like app. I still have my files on DropBox, so if I decide to switch back it would be easy, just copy any updated files out of iCloud. I'll give it a couple of weeks and see how I like it or if I get the spinning beach ball again, I will definitely switch back.
 
I'm not sure I understand what iCloud is trying to do. I love how reminders, notes, and contacts sync, however, with documents, I just don't get it. Plus I never use iWork.

I think Google's implementation of the cloud is far superior to iCloud:

-Google Docs are easy to share and allow other users to interactively edit (possible on iCloud?)

-Store files the old fashioned way with Google Drive, but still acts as a local folder

I was excited for iCloud, and it's pretty good for a lot of things, but it's overhyped.
 
blipmusic said:
But I might for several reasons have a need to relate some mime-types/file-types to others and unfortunately a file-centric system is currently simpler in that respect.
Click to expand...
The weird thing is that there's no reason Apple couldn't have allowed cross-app file lookup for iCloud, as all the data is there; any app with an Info.plist should already be announcing which files it's interested in, so there seems no reason why the iCloud tab can't just do a lookup within your mobile documents for that type of file; hell, it could be backed by a local Spotlight search behind the scenes.
It'd be much better overall, even if the files were still grouped by app in the results, though with a list view option there's no reason we couldn't have simple sort by name and such as well.

The really confusing part is that with documents being app-centric, Apple have actually introduced the problem of having multiple copies of the same file, stored in various states for different apps! So if you do manage to pass a file between apps, if they're all using iCloud you could end up with several versions of that one file, each stored under a different app; it makes any multi-stage process particularly confusing.
 
iCloud isn't like Dropbox: you can't just store anything on there, it only works for specific apps, and only for saving and opening with those apps. There is no way to browse iCloud and say select a bunch of files and Zip them. There is no way to Quicklook anything, and there's no way to put those files onto USB or anything like that.

iCloud is nice if you have a newer generation iPhone or an iPad, but I don't think you're meant to use it for anything else!

I have a 2nd Gen iPod Touch and using iCloud actually blocks iTunes from syncing anything with my iPod… which doesn't support iCloud, so there's no way to sync stuff to my iPod. I stupidly turned it on and I had to restore from a backup to get my stuff back, as my whole calendar just got deleted. Turning iCloud off also deleted it from my Mac, and restoring from Time Machine also restored iCloud to be turned on.

Needless to say, I won't be trying iCloud again!
 
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