The Mac iCloud/iWork dilemma

Since my posting in July about Online Cloud Storage and the need for iOS device users to have subscribe to a number of Cloud Storage Services (CSS), I was very hopeful that at least for my work within iWork I finally had document syncing between my iPad and Mac via Apple’s iCloud. What a disappointment!

During Apple’s WWDC 11 Keynote in June we were told during the iCloud introduction:

• that the Mac would be demoted to just being a device like the iPhone
• iCloud will store our content and wirelessly pushes it to all our devices
• iCloud will be integrated with our apps, so everything happens automatically
• It just works
• Documents in the cloud is the most inventive part of iCloud

To be fair, Contacts, Calendars, Mail and Books do sync nicely between all iOS and Mac devices. However, as to Documents in the Cloud, it only works between iOS devices automatically.

Syncing with iWork document between the Mac and any iOS device is a pain, a big pain, it works manually requiring many steps. Yes there is a way to use the “Mobile Documents” folder which suddenly showed up with in the user’s “Library” folder after activating iCloud on the Mac, but it is a one-way sync from Mac-to-iOS only, and it requires manual saving to that folder. Further, the trying to save the original file on the Mac again, after being transferred to and opened on your iOS device, will result in being prompted to save it elsewhere or to delete it. Working the other way, iOS-to-Mac doesn’t work, since iCloud changes the document format.

So much for “It just works.” My only hope is that Apple will listen to all the complains and fix very soon.

For now, I will continue to use Dropbox with CloudDAV(iSMEStorage) to have access to the latest versions of my iWork documents on all my devices. It still requires some manual saving and opening, but it is less painful than the current iCloud workflow.