“In OS X Mountain Lion, iCloud begins to take shape as the smart, automated way to store documents on a per-app, device independent basis, incrementally displacing the local file system that non-technical users have long struggled to comprehend and replacing it with a cloud-based service that connects and synchronizes desktop and mobile devices via the Internet,” Daniel Eran Dilger reports for AppleInsider.
Dilger reports, “Seven years ago, speaking at the ‘All Things Digital’ conference in 2005, Stev Jobs noted that ‘in every user interface study we’ve ever done,” Apple found that ‘it’s pretty easy to learn how to use these things until you hit the file system and then the learning curve goes vertical. So you ask yourself, why is the file system the face of the OS? Wouldn’t it be better if there was a better way to find stuff?’ Jobs then contrasted the conventional OS-level file system for managing documents on a computer to an email application, explaining that ‘there’s always been a better way to find stuff. You don’t keep your e-mail on your file system, right? The app manages it. And that was the breakthrough, as an example, in iTunes,’ Jobs stated.”
Dilger reports, “With iCloud, end users don’t have to think about where those individual media or app files are stored or how, any more than they have to worry about the precise changes in voltage or magnetic fields that store the bits that represent the data in those files… The big new iCloud feature in Mountain Lion, however, is completed support for Documents in the Cloud, the foundational network architecture that erases users’ dependance upon manually managing documents in the file system.”
Read more in the full article here.