So I made a thread about this in iCloud forum but I might as well post the video here. This video is made by a friend, not me, as I described what happened to me (but don't have my iPad to film it yet) he recreated the steps and the same thing occurred.
Here is what the issue is. If you try to "Handoff" a document which is saved and synced with the cloud (e.g. if you just open a saved document on your iPad, then click the Handoff icon in the finder on OS X) - the Handoff button will simply instruct OS X to open the app and then open the save document, it'll take seconds.
However, if you are working on a document which hasn't synced or saved (which 90% of us would be) and you click HandOff to continue working on it from another device, it then instructs the file to save, sync, upload, then be downloaded and opened on the other device (doesn't matter if its iOS to OS X or the other way around)
Still you'd think this could be done in few seconds right? Wrong, watch the video below, for some reason, in my tests this can take anything from 45 seconds to over 15 minutes to happen
(and in many cases I just gave up waiting, or it times out and just appears at the open dialog for whatever app is instructed)
For a start off the sync should be almost instant, sure if you'd dropped a 20mb video into the document, thats a different story, but if you've deleted one character of text?! iCloud Drive should be doing an incremental update of the file ASAP like Dropbox would. Further more we have to be on the same wifi network for this to happen, so why are they not employing Airdrop technology (or similar) to send over the changes between documents and handling the syncing later in the background. For the example I just gave with a 20mb file, this makes sense to use the LAN to pass it off to the opposite device and not insist on uploading and then download from the internet?! If you're on slow internet like me this would take 30 minutes, or worse still if you've got no internet connection, this should happen without needing one and the synced document could be updated later.
The video example below looks as if you are syncing a 20mb file, but instead my friend merely deleted a few words from the simple Pages document and this occurred.
This is effectively a broken feature. I noticed Craig didn't even demonstrate this on the keynote, he made a change and then he interrupted it to demo receiving a text message, at that time the document was probably saving and syncing - he the did Handoff for a Safari webpage (which works fine) and instead navigated to the iCloud drive to manually open the document he was working on, which had obviously updated in the mean time on the mac so none of this happened.
I'm surprised this isn't all over the net, its a failed feature. If for Handoff to work the file has to be synced and downloaded on the other device, then theres no point to it at all, you might as well just open the saved files. One other minor issue I have, if you start an iMessage then wish to carry it on, on another device it doesn't copy the message over, it'll only open Message's into the thread to the person you're talking to.
Of all the none stories and things people usually moan about with Apple and there isn't a single post about this not working, its the first thing thats genuinely annoyed me. Not to mention Handoff icons appearing at all are sketchy at best anyway.
Here is the video example.
http://youtu.be/l2SJuPoWuA0
If anyone in the states can demonstrate otherwise then maybe its a server issue that's only affected Europe or the UK, otherwise I plead you to attempt the same in Pages, Numbers or Keynote. Come on
!
Here is what the issue is. If you try to "Handoff" a document which is saved and synced with the cloud (e.g. if you just open a saved document on your iPad, then click the Handoff icon in the finder on OS X) - the Handoff button will simply instruct OS X to open the app and then open the save document, it'll take seconds.
However, if you are working on a document which hasn't synced or saved (which 90% of us would be) and you click HandOff to continue working on it from another device, it then instructs the file to save, sync, upload, then be downloaded and opened on the other device (doesn't matter if its iOS to OS X or the other way around)
Still you'd think this could be done in few seconds right? Wrong, watch the video below, for some reason, in my tests this can take anything from 45 seconds to over 15 minutes to happen
(and in many cases I just gave up waiting, or it times out and just appears at the open dialog for whatever app is instructed)For a start off the sync should be almost instant, sure if you'd dropped a 20mb video into the document, thats a different story, but if you've deleted one character of text?! iCloud Drive should be doing an incremental update of the file ASAP like Dropbox would. Further more we have to be on the same wifi network for this to happen, so why are they not employing Airdrop technology (or similar) to send over the changes between documents and handling the syncing later in the background. For the example I just gave with a 20mb file, this makes sense to use the LAN to pass it off to the opposite device and not insist on uploading and then download from the internet?! If you're on slow internet like me this would take 30 minutes, or worse still if you've got no internet connection, this should happen without needing one and the synced document could be updated later.
The video example below looks as if you are syncing a 20mb file, but instead my friend merely deleted a few words from the simple Pages document and this occurred.
This is effectively a broken feature. I noticed Craig didn't even demonstrate this on the keynote, he made a change and then he interrupted it to demo receiving a text message, at that time the document was probably saving and syncing - he the did Handoff for a Safari webpage (which works fine) and instead navigated to the iCloud drive to manually open the document he was working on, which had obviously updated in the mean time on the mac so none of this happened.
I'm surprised this isn't all over the net, its a failed feature. If for Handoff to work the file has to be synced and downloaded on the other device, then theres no point to it at all, you might as well just open the saved files. One other minor issue I have, if you start an iMessage then wish to carry it on, on another device it doesn't copy the message over, it'll only open Message's into the thread to the person you're talking to.
Of all the none stories and things people usually moan about with Apple and there isn't a single post about this not working, its the first thing thats genuinely annoyed me. Not to mention Handoff icons appearing at all are sketchy at best anyway.
Here is the video example.
http://youtu.be/l2SJuPoWuA0
If anyone in the states can demonstrate otherwise then maybe its a server issue that's only affected Europe or the UK, otherwise I plead you to attempt the same in Pages, Numbers or Keynote. Come on
!
