OS X Mountain Lion's Documents in the Cloud Simplifies File Access Across Devices

[Renzatic]

They're getting rid of the filesystem!

(Personally I can't wait)

I don't get it. What's with all this hate over the file system? Is organizing stuff considered pro level computer usage now?

"Before Ossicx 10.9, what we now call The Dark Days, I used to put all my vacation photos in separate folders. One folder with all our pictures from Macchu Picchu. One folder with all our pictures from Hawaii. It was hellish. But nowadays? ALL OUR PICTURES ARE ALL IN ONE CONVENIENT EASY TO FIND SPOT! IT'S SO GREAT! Here. Let me show you this one picture we took at the Grand Canyon".

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"...wait. They're around here somewhere".

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"Okay. These are the pictures we took last year. We're getting near them".

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"...almost. Ah. Okay. Here we go. Just click on the thumbnail and wait 3 minutes for it to download from The Cloud. Wait. How many bars do you have? Just two? Well, wait about 10 minutes then. ISN'T LIFE SO MUCH SIMPLER THESE DAYS? I FEEL LIKE THE COMPUTER WORKS FOR ME NOW"!

 

[Mr. Gates]

Not true.

I just put 15 in a folder and can still put more.

Well I don't remember what the limit is.

But there IS a limit.

I always Jailbreak so it really has no effect on me. I do whatever the hell I want.

Otherwise I would go straight to Android or Windows phone

 

[mw360]

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Because that whole exact story happens more often than... 'Ah, where did I save it again?' Sure...

 

[valkata]

What I would really like to see is the ability to email someone a link to a specific document in iCloud, so I don't have to email a huge attachment. This should be built into Mail. It would be way more convenient than YouSendIt and the likes, and more convenient than MobileMe's file sharing mechanism via iDisk, too.

And what your friend with Android smart phone or Linux PC will do with your iCloud link?

 

[Hardtimes]

They can't completely remove it until most apps are updated to support it. In Steve Jobs' last presentation he said he has been working for a long time to "get rid of the file system". It's very clear that Apple feels like the current method of organizing files (finder) is an antiquated system. Files being stored exclusively in their respective apps is the future for Apple products.

I wish they would think about the every day users of their products rather than just media types and those who just enjoy dicking around.

How on earth could you manage a project that consists of different files in the above way? let alone hundreds of projects.

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No I wasn't. This is a sign of things to come. The file system as we know it is slowly being taken away from us, one piece at a time. I actually can't wait. I'm sure Apple will kinda cock it up at first, but they (or somebody) will get there in the end.

Y'see, unlike the 20+ folks who downvoted me, I thoroughly despise the filesystem. Why present me with literally 1million+ hierarchically stored files and folders when all I want to do is load a jpeg I saved 5 seconds ago from a different app. Loading and saving files and navigating between folders in a dozen different apps is the biggest waste of time I encounter in my computer related duties.

What does a file system do that's so great? Who actually spends time 'using' a filesystem, and isn't there something better they could be doing with their lives? It's just files, sitting around doing nothing other than being badly organised in some archaic tree structure. How should I lay out my files? Keep 1 folder for every project I work on (Project A Project B), or one folder for every kind of file I store (Photos, artwork, invoices)? Huh? It's 2012 and I still have to DECIDE between those two equally vital organisational methods?

It's time to go. Dump all the files into hidden system folders and give me a UI that spares me the torture of having to wander back and forth between essentially meaningless and gigantic folder structures and actually just present me with the small set of files that I'm overwhelming likely to want, by nature of the fact that I've been opening the same three frickin' files for the last month, or maybe by nature of the fact they're the only files that my current app can actually open.

What about those of use that you know... do work.
I don't work on one image or one document at a time. I work on about 3000.
How am I going to find that pages file, its corresponding numbers file and the 20 or so jpegs that go with it?

See where I'm coming from?

I don't want to open up 4 different apps just to open each one. I want to look at the dates modified then hold down shift-select the files I want and hit enter.

What about when I need to archive my projects? how will I find the data in one place 10 years down the line when a client is trying to sue me for something or other?

Open up 4 apps and hope I can find something?

 

[Renzatic]

Because that whole exact story happens more often than... 'Ah, where did I save it again?' Sure...

Yeah, lets take a perfectly functional system that risks you occasionally forgetting where you saved something, and replace it with one that gives you no choice, and is entirely too tedious.

Going by that logic, I'm pretty sure you think keys are stupid, cuz of that one time you accidentally locked them in your car. That situation would've been entirely avoided if car manufacturers made it so a single button unlocked your doors and cranked your car for you, right?

And yes, that exact story happens to me every damn day. I've got close to 300 pictures on my iPhone. I wish I could organize them into folders, but I can't. So what do I do if I want to find a specific picture?

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It's annoying. But it's an annoyance that could be fixed if I could just FREAKING ORGANIZE MY PHOTOS INTO FOLDERS!

 

[kevm]

Well I don't remember what the limit is.

But there IS a limit.

I always Jailbreak so it really has no effect on me. I do whatever the hell I want.

Otherwise I would go straight to Android or Windows phone

Well the limit is at least 416 my guess it is somewhere near 4 billion.

 

[MattInOz]

You're assuming they won't have some sort of replacement if they do remove the Finder. They might as well just remove it now if we go with your assumption.

If we don't run with your assumption, you could instead see this as Apple providing a choice just like they are with the Mac App Store.

Simply said, stop predicting the absolute worst case scenario that would actually hurt Apple. Just because you can think it doesn't mean it will happen, especially when all evidence so far points to OS X remaining it's own beast instead of Apple slowly porting iOS to Mac hardware.

I think there could be a really good way for them to go. That is all in the same direction as all the "Sky is Falling" Crew. Yet will be an improvement. I mean we always hear the call to Fix the Finder. I'm hoping this is all part of that. A move away from a File System into a collection of File Services. Each Service like iCloud has in these Screenshots could have it's own Interface style. Importantly each service has it's own boundaries, has it's own Process, own memory, own scratch/cache volume. One service stalls nothing locks up. Each Service takes charge of what happens in the event of disconnection. Even Devices plugen in by USB/Firewire/Thunderbolt could be treated as Services.

To me this seems to draw a clear line. A service is someone who manages stuff on my behave. Stuff Apple manages for me iCloud, Stuff i take care of myself "On MY Mac". I'm hoping there is third group stuff I have managed for me. So we could see dropbox, and the like get their own tab.

 

[FluJunkie]

That day I'll be forced to switch (back) to Linux.

This.

 

[Gasu E.]

The "cloud" is not as great as they're making it out to be. It is a city thing. Out in rural areas the cloud is often not accessible. Bandwidth is low. Coverage is spotty or non-existent. Apple is ostracizing rural users. If you don't live in the urban areas you're not worth of being their customer. Fact: the world is not connected.

Yeah, most of the world is connected. It's not just urban areas in developed countries, it's suburban areas and developing countries. I'm sorry the 5% who can't get broadband are getting left behind. But there's a reason people live in crowded, dirty, smelly, noisy cities-- we get better access to stuff. You made a choice, and you really need to accept the consequence. Bad access to stuff is the obvious byproduct of your choosing an otherwise wonderful lifestyle. You can't have it both ways, and it's unfair to the rest of us who make other choices to expect us to forego our few advantages.

 

[pensoftware]

This for the desktop...

Well yes, but it's the same concept but extended to desktops.

 

[arkmannj]

I just want to know how many files one can put into a folder.

and can you have sub folder(s) ?

 

[robertosh]

great, well thinked. The only thing that i don't like so much from Osx is Finder. I think that in 10.9 or 11, this solution will replace Finder completely. The file explorer is a past thing. It would be great for compatible iOs apps to implement this interface too.

 

[babyj]

If people are paying for the space, they need to be able to provide it. Nobody else enforces silly limits because of space limitations, they use a REAL cloud such as S3, Rackspace or Azure as opposed to a single datacenter. Apple doesnt seem to 'get it' when it comes to online services.

Think you're the one that doesn't get it - iCloud runs on Azure and S3.

 

[gwest]

Dropbox is Superior

And if you can't access the Cloud or have bumped into a data cap?

This is exactly why Dropbox is superior- if you can't connect to your iCloud account, you're dead in the water.

It sounds great to be able to store files in the cloud and access them from anywhere/any machine, but the fact of the matter is that when you need access to your files, you can't chance a connection problem. Not to mention that large data files- all quality multimedia files- are too large to upload and work on while in "the cloud".

With Dropbox you have a local copy and an automatic backup when there is a connection. Steve knew the brilliance of this when he met with the Dropbox creators and tried to buy them out.

We'll never be without the need of local storage. I'd trust only the least important documents I have exclusively to the cloud. We'll need Thunderbolt and SSDs to advance our mobile computing if internal storage continues to be minimized.

 

[rmwebs]

Think you're the one that doesn't get it - iCloud runs on Azure and S3.

No, it uses it as a data cache. Big difference. iClouds file requests go directly through Apple's own datacenter.

 

[saberahul]

My worry isn't the iCloud system, but the limited 5GB they provide free. Most of us will probably have to pay to upgrade our data caps.

True, however with the uprise in technology year after year, I wouldn't be surprised if we were given 10GB free by end of next year or so. Dropbox and such have already moved from 2GB to 5GB.

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This is exactly why Dropbox is superior- if you can't connect to your iCloud account, you're dead in the water.

Well, I do not know about ML but on the iPad, even with no wifi the Pages documents are accessible as there is a local copy on the iPad. The changes and the new documents are uploaded to the cloud and then automatically downloaded on all devices for me (iOS ones for now).

 

[Soundhound]

I just don't see how this is going to work for me. I file things by project, not by the app that created the particular file. A job will have files created by Pages, Word, Quicktimes, pdfs, powerpoint, etc. Is iCloud always going to organize things by app? If so, I guess Ill just stay with Dropbox, it works great, and I use it for almost everything I do these days.

 

[SvK]

what about large files like a Logic9 project folder of say 1gig?

 

[AidenShaw]

what about large files like a Logic9 project folder of say 1gig?

"Large files" of "1 GB"?

V:\VMware\VMs\Blackcomb> dir *.vmdk
 Volume in drive V is VMware
 Volume Serial Number is 20E2-7678

 Directory of V:\VMware\VMs\Blackcomb

2012-02-16  08:00     7,569,604,608 Scsi0.00-Boot.XP.vmdk
2012-02-16  08:00    29,398,073,344 Scsi0.01-Win7x64.vmdk
2012-02-16  07:22     4,294,967,296 Scsi0.02-H-flat.vmdk
2012-02-16  08:01               544 Scsi0.02-H.vmdk
2011-11-08  09:59    31,984,582,656 Scsi0.03-N.vmdk
2012-02-16  07:22    68,730,214,400 Scsi0.05-N.$check-flat.vmdk
2012-02-16  08:01               524 Scsi0.05-N.$check.vmdk
2011-11-08  10:00   218,092,011,520 Scsi0.08-O.vmdk
2011-11-08  10:00   718,628,716,544 Scsi0.11-Q.vmdk
2011-11-16  12:24   361,188,425,728 Scsi0.14-I.vmdk
2011-11-08  10:00 1,036,988,841,984 Scsi1.00-R.vmdk
2011-11-08  10:01   926,889,345,024 Scsi1.02-R.x.vmdk
2011-11-08  10:01   748,554,682,368 Scsi1.04-R.z.vmdk
2012-02-16  08:01   260,186,701,824 Scsi1.08-T.vmdk
              14 File(s) 4,412,506,168,364 bytes

Yep, the biggest file in that directory is 1,036 GB, and 4.4 TB total.

 

[MorphingDragon]

"Large files" of "1 GB"?

V:\VMware\VMs\Blackcomb> dir *.vmdk
 Volume in drive V is VMware
 Volume Serial Number is 20E2-7678

 Directory of V:\VMware\VMs\Blackcomb

2012-02-16  08:00     7,569,604,608 Scsi0.00-Boot.XP.vmdk
2012-02-16  08:00    29,398,073,344 Scsi0.01-Win7x64.vmdk
2012-02-16  07:22     4,294,967,296 Scsi0.02-H-flat.vmdk
2012-02-16  08:01               544 Scsi0.02-H.vmdk
2011-11-08  09:59    31,984,582,656 Scsi0.03-N.vmdk
2012-02-16  07:22    68,730,214,400 Scsi0.05-N.$check-flat.vmdk
2012-02-16  08:01               524 Scsi0.05-N.$check.vmdk
2011-11-08  10:00   218,092,011,520 Scsi0.08-O.vmdk
2011-11-08  10:00   718,628,716,544 Scsi0.11-Q.vmdk
2011-11-16  12:24   361,188,425,728 Scsi0.14-I.vmdk
2011-11-08  10:00 1,036,988,841,984 Scsi1.00-R.vmdk
2011-11-08  10:01   926,889,345,024 Scsi1.02-R.x.vmdk
2011-11-08  10:01   748,554,682,368 Scsi1.04-R.z.vmdk
2012-02-16  08:01   260,186,701,824 Scsi1.08-T.vmdk
              14 File(s) 4,412,506,168,364 bytes

Yep, the biggest file in that directory is 1,036 GB, and 4.4 TB total.

I keep testing clusters and their KVM image files and I thought they get big but damn... 1TB.

 

[aggri1]

But I wonder how well it will work for those of us who organize our files by project rather than by application...

Yeah that's what I wonder too.

I expect that this sort of 'file system' would be a boon to those people who store every file they've ever worked on on their desktop.

Those of us who can organise files by "project", this seems like a real pain.

And I don't consider Spotlight (or equivalent search) in any possible way an answer. There is simply no way that every file can have a unique enough name that it makes sense and isn't absurdly cumbersome.

Furthermore, I find that with a sensible, organised folder structure, I can find a file whose name I know much faster through a series of hierarchical menus (like the good old Apple Menu used to have (after MacOS8 or so, or with BeHierarchic), now do-able with menu extras or whatever they're called) than Spotlight can find it. Yes, on my new-ish iMac, Spotlight is too slow to find files.

 

[ricosuave]

Is a new beta version of iWork required? I don't see the iCloud integration in ML with this version.

 

[dsuden]

I wouldn't mind seeing directories icons like iOS in the regular Finder. Of course, without the 12 item limit!

That'll be nice for those who like that approach, which works OK for me on an IOS device, where, up until now, the number of files has been limited, and organized into subfolders, but when we're dealing with hundreds or thousands of document files as we do in business, I'm hopeful we'll still have access to a list view.

That said, I'm sure Apple will continue to make the list option available for people like me who have a hard time finding files in icon view.

 

[Stella]

That'll be nice for those who like that approach, which works OK for me on an IOS device, where, up until now, the number of files has been limited, and organized into subfolders, but when we're dealing with hundreds or thousands of document files as we do in business, I'm hopeful we'll still have access to a list view.

That said, I'm sure Apple will continue to make the list option available for people like me who have a hard time finding files in icon view.

You need sub directories... I remember looking at my work's design document directory.. and thinking about those who want the File System to be removed... yea, it isn't going to happen especially with Apple's approach to the Cloud.