Documents in the Cloud Interesting Fail

[Lloyd Braun]

Working on a Pages document, I chose Share > Export > PDF and saved it to iCloud. The PDF didn't appear in Preview's list of iCloud PDFs, but still appeared in Pages' list of documents as a greyed-out PDF (because Pages can't natively open PDFs).

Thanks. I just created an unusable document.

I had to drag the greyed-out PDF out of the iCloud window onto my Desktop, and drag it into Preview's iCloud window.

LOL.

I'm not complaining too much, mind you, because we all know iCloud still has a ways to go before it becomes a full-time document storage solution.

 

[jameslmoser]

Haha, yeah I knew it was limited, but didn't realize how bad it was. Dropbox is much better because it is simple and doesn't try to fix something that wasn't broken. Something Apple has been trying to do a lot of lately.

 

[tkermit]

Yeah, that behavior seems kind of nonsensical...

The problem appears to be that Apple simply calls it 'iCloud' everywhere in the GUI, while in reality you're dealing with a multitude of application-specifc iCloud silos, for Pages, Preview, Mail, Textedit etc. This arguably makes only a limited amount of sense in OS X – certainly for experienced users.

At least in OS X it is possible to use the Finder to access iCloud documents. So you're not forced to go into the app first, as you are on iOS. It is also possible for apps to access iCloud documents that were saved in other apps, again, unlike iOS, by using Spotlight search.