If you look at the streamer hanging in the lobby of Moscone West last calendar week , you would have found a very important but perhaps somewhat subtle statement stare you mighty in the cheek .
At first coup d’oeil , there was nothing surprising about the banner : Lion plus iOS 5 plus iCloud . Three subject featured during the company ’s keynote last week , and the same three highlight in Apple’spress button announce the WWDC tonic .
But the interesting part isn’twhatwas on the banner ; it’show . As Apple ’s major platforms , it ’s to be expected that iOS and Lion would be the focus of the company ’s developer league . iCloud , though , was something brand raw — and yet it got equal footing with two of Apple ’s flagship products .
Not all files are created equal: Viewing pictures as thumbnails may make sense, but songs?
That ’s because , going frontwards , iCloud is lead to be just as important for the company as either iOS or Mac OS X — if not more . In a workweek full of major declaration , iCloud was in spades the most important of the three , and it ’s sure the one with the farthest - get to implication for Apple ’s scheme and the users of its products .
Going MobileMe?
Both before and after the tonic , comparisons of iCloud to Apple ’s blemished MobileMe online service seemed to crop up with a oftenness normally reserved for political scandals . But while it may be tempting to pull back a straightforward line from Apple ’s previous on-line venture to its unexampled one , the two are markedly unlike . MobileMe ( like iTools and .Mac before it ) was always an rethink , an adjuvant product that was more a concession by Apple to the necessity of an on-line presence than an acknowledgement of just how fundamentally the Internet has shift our interactions with engineering .
But that latter reason has clearly informed Apple ’s development of iCloud . While the inspection and repair does make on parts of MobileMe , it takes just those percentage that raise the machine experience : specifically , the idea of ubiquitous data without user treatment .
Apple has been just as flying to trim the fat , too , though . All indication charge to iDisk , iWeb hosting , and MobileMe Galleries move the way of thegarefowl . It seems as though Apple has yield its ground in those areas — a chic move , since those aspect of the service were born of an geological era where being online meant create your own content and hosting it somewhere . At the time , competitors like Yahoo and Google were threatening to dominate the space , so it was n’t surprising that Apple might have felt like it had to plant a pin or risk of exposure being shut out .
Not all files are created equal: Viewing pictures as thumbnails may make sense, but songs?
So the troupe set that fleur-de-lis — and then leave it more or less flutter in the wind . That should n’t be a surprisal , though : Apple was never really interested in being a Web substance host ; it just did n’t want to be the only one standing when the music stopped . With iCloud , the fellowship has instead rightly chosen to focus — and expand — on the face of connectivity that ensnarl with the company ’s philosophic and business goals : promoting and trade its devices .
Lord of the files
So what exactlyisiCloud ?
AsDaring Fireball ’s John Gruber pointed out , it come down to a single line uttered by Steve Jobs during the keynote : “ We ’re going to kick downstairs the PC and the Mac to just be a gadget . ”
To anyone who ’s been following Apple for a long sentence , there ’s always been a tacit assumption that the Mac — due to its length of service , if not the society ’s “ digital hub ” strategy — has always been the company ’s primary platform , despite the fact that Apple ’s mobile gadget have outpace it in terms of sales mass for some fourth dimension now . Monday ’s announcement tacitly confirmed that former land of affairs ( after all , if the Mac was n’t top banana , it could n’t really be demoted ) but it ’s deserving noting that it did n’t “ fall behind ” that distinguish to iOS ; instead , all those ironware equipment are now on the same degree playing field of battle — and they all look to the same third source : iCloud .
iCloud the next step in an effort to absent the idea of the filesystem from the computing experience — an effort that began as far back as app like iTunes and iPhoto . Apple ’s introduction of the iPad made great tread in this department , but there were still problems : preferably or later on , most iPad users had to interact with the filesystem of a traditional computer . How , then , did you move Indian file to a gimmick that had no expose filesystem ?
Apple ’s solution was the clunky , bolted - oniTunes File Sharing — in hindsight , clearly little more than a stop - gap solution . Meanwhile , third parties came up with their own schemes , ranging from relying on syncing divine service like Dropbox to establish - in Indian file servers that let you ride part of the iPad ’s storage distance as a book on your Mac . File management on the iPad ( and the iPhone ) has been , to appointment , a split experience : It ’s got too many ways to move files around , and none of them are very skilful . It ’s one of the few things that makes the iPad feel like it ’s not quite a full citizen in the technology humans .
Clearly , Apple skip iCloud will become that canonical solution , bridging the watershed between these new types of gimmick and legacy PC .
It ’s an uphill climb , though . In the same room that the iPad has set up out to change the idea of computing , iCloud aims to eliminate the canonical idea of files . After all , you do n’t really have files — you havestuff : pictures , video , Song dynasty , Holy Writ , document , presentations , spreadsheet , and so on .
The idea of “ the file ” is a conceitedness that we ’ve been bind with for decades , but in many ways it ’s no more relevant to us these days than segmenting your data over a handful of floppy record or worrying about which tidy sum of punchcards your course of study is encoded on . sure enough , files are the way computers understand information — but they ’re not necessarily the wayusersshould interpret their datum .
For good example , consider a folder of photograph and a pamphlet of songs . The Finder largely treat them the same way : There ’s a bunch of item you could select , move , cutting off , spread , delete , rename , and so on . But while the computer treats those files as basically the same eccentric of target , they ’re not the same from a user ’s perspective . What do you want to do with a song ? trifle it , pause it , put it in a play list , scrub through it , rank it , and so on . What do you want to do with a photo ? View it , browse it , rotate it , pluck the colors , put it in an record album , identify the citizenry in it , et cetera . These manifestly are n’t the same kind of data , and they should n’t be regale as such . Viewing exposure as a collecting of thumbnails is pretty handy — for songs , not so much .
Not all files are created equal : look at pictures as thumbnails may make sense , but Song ?
But once you leave the Finder behind for a political platform like iPhoto or iTunes , you ’re not divvy up with the files but with the stuff itself . Not only do those applications furnish us with the right contextual tools to deal with the specific eccentric of content , but they also take tutelage of cope those file cabinet on the disk . They eliminate the command processing overhead of having to think about where you ’re saving a file , or whether you need to make a fill-in before edit it . All those tasks can be handled by the system , without a witting feat on the user ’s part .
And really , why should the user have to deal with it ? The idea that we should view our data as files is no less arbitrary than see them as a collection of ace and zeroes . It ’s technically right — it ’s just not reallyusefulfor your medium human . More than anything , though , it ’s just the way it ’s always been done .
look back , the iPad now seems in some direction like a sort of exam balloon for iCloud . Apple ’s tablet was all about taking the concepts of computing that we ’ve stick to to for 25 eld , rethink what they aim to accomplish , and hear to picture out whether there was a better way . But we still end up dish out with , thinking about , and worry over single file , thanks to anachronistic feature like iTunes File Sharing .
iCloud take that vision of a file - less time to come to the next step : No more worrying about where to redeem things , or where you put that data file . By having apps take care of the nitty - gritty item of data file management , we ’re moving from the text file - centrical user interface of the last 20 years or so to an coating - centric model . It ’s about activeness instead of objective , verbs rather of nouns .
It ’s not a organization without flaws , of track , and we wo n’t even know many of those until we ’ve in reality spent some timber clock time with iCloud . But , if you view this as the latest data point point on a chain stretch out from iTunes to the iPad , Apple ’s next flight is clear : the idea of arbitrary “ files ” are destined for the same fate as the command line . Not perfect and utter annihilation , but a gentle retreat where they ’re only occasionally called upon to do their former duty .
Clouds one through eight
This overarch strategic move is what make iCloud different from alike venture . Superficially , iCloud certainly calculate a lot like swarm depot effort we ’ve seen from troupe like Google and Microsoft . In fact , I can guarantee you that when I get back home and verbalize to the great unwashed about iCloud , at least one of my supporter will say something like : “ Storing file cabinet on the Internet ? What ’s the bighearted deal ? We ’ve been doing that for years . ” But , like anIron Chefcompetition , while theingredientsare the same , Apple ’s conjured up a in spades different bag as the end result .
Because it ’s notwhatApple ’s doing , of course , it’showthe company is doing it . The low-toned - level integration and , more significantly , thetransparencyare what make iCloud such a big mint . There were a number of demos during Monday ’s keynote that showed this off to enceinte effect — though it ’s gruelling to even call them demos , as they commonly involve little more than an Apple railroad engineer getting up on stage , and effectively tell , “ Look , I did n’t have to do anything . It just worked . ”
Apple has try this with a sort of other technology in the yesteryear , including backups , video chat , music - making , and more . Those attempt have had varying degree of success , but in almost every representative , they ’ve at least raise the bar for both Apple and its competitors in terms of what amount next . While iCloud might be distinct from the swarm services offered by Microsoft , Google , and Amazon , there seems to be very little question that it will labour all of those efforts fore by demand that user not be get to with trivial ideas like files any more .
So discontinue believe about iCloud as though it ’s merely another cloud warehousing service or just a permutation for MobileMe . See it instead for what it ’s stand for to be : an underlying part of Apple ’s ecosystem . And if it save on the company ’s promises , it could fend to be just as integral to Apple ’s future as its other key serve — one that you in all likelihood expend every day , oftentimes without even recollect about it : the iTunes Store .
[ Dan Moren is a Macworld senior associate editor who finished this clause while fly through real cloud . ]
