With the iPad, Apple demonstrated new multitouch versions of desktop-class iWorks apps with user interfaces that need to open and save documents. There's still no file system browser with open and save panels. Instead, each app displays the files it knows about at launch for the user to navigate through directly.
An iPad developer has revealed to AppleInsider how this new mechanism works, without also requiring that users learn about the complexity of the underlying file system. Rather than iPad apps saving their documents into a wide open file system, apps on iPad save all their documents within their own installation directory. Delete the app and you'll clean out all of its related files. This is how the iPhone OS already works.
Additionally, iPad apps can now specify that their documents be shared wirelessly. With that configuration, the iPad will make available each apps' documents, allowing the user to wirelessly mount their iPad via WiFi and simply drag and drop files back and forth between it and their desktop computer.
On the desktop system, the iPad will show up as a share containing a documents folder for each app that enables sharing. For example, a user with iWork apps will be able to wirelessly connect to their iPad as if it were a directly connected drive, and simply drag spreadsheet, presentation, or word processing files between their local system and the mobile device as desired.
The link has more. Found this interesting...wonder if OSX is going to head this way?
That's useful info. Thx. I wondered how the wireless sharing would work. They don't let you have full control over the file system like on our machines, only certain parts, for security reasons I'm sure.
I wonder if it's also to help simplify the file system like the article suggests?
I wouldn't mind that because frankly I don't need access to everything. OSX works beautifully for me and so I would be fine with that.
The only thing is when you want to choose a different program for a file. For instance, you import a picture. Rather than have iPhoto be the default program, the ability to choose another one would be nice. (that's if programs like that could be ported to the iPad).
For instance, you import a picture. Rather than have iPhoto be the default program, the ability to choose another one would be nice. (that's if programs like that could be ported to the iPad).
The majority of consumer users can't think that far into it, that's what Apple's shooting for.
It would be nice to have an expert and regular mode switch though.
#492112 - 01/30/1012:15 PMRe: Interesting article on the iPad and file shari
[Re: Jim_]
Ben Dover
Colorectalogist Emeritus
Registered: 06/12/09
Posts: 709
Loc: Sunnyvale, CA, USA
Well, for cloud devices any extensions probably should be on a webserver - Anything you need to happen locally can happen on a webserver. Now that Apple's building out a cloud platform, that's probably pretty sweet for them, since if you're going that direction, it only makes sense to go with something like S3, Google, Apple, Akamai, whomever, with redundancy across multiple datacenters to avoid the outages that can happen with standalone islands like Rackspace or whomever.
It's not difficult to imagine that the cloud is the money machine for everybody. It's good for the hardware guys because devices can get dumber and dumber and more local stuff gets offloaded (including rendering, parallel processing [bio, telemetry, etc, stuff, etc, etc], therefore cheaper, therefore sell a lot more junk for that there cloud thang. More devices equal more content/services and bandwidth demand. Everybody makes money. And now Apple is getting themselves nicely plugged into the machine, in several sectors, in hardware, content broker, app platform, and cloud services/provider.
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