Wouldn’t It Be Great If iCloud Was More Like Dropbox?

AppleBitch comments that there was a problem yesterday, in that Dropbox connectivity was sporadic and, even when connected, incredibly and painfully slow. At one point some users couldn’t even connect to the Dropbox [I noticed! Ed.], so in order to share some data between a MacBook Air and an iMac, a quick shifted over to Google Drive (previously terra incognita) did the trick, with the file transfer quick and easy, as it had been when Dropbox was working.

What was an irritation was the fact that one couldn’t go straight to iCloud since the files were in PDF and PowerPoint format, and document sharing in iCloud is limited to applications that have been granted iCloud functionality, instead of universal file access.

Which pretty much captures concisely why I’ve never bothered with iCloud, and have no near-term intention of doing so. I have no patience with what seems like arbitrary, cynical, proprietary gatekeeping. Apple doesn’t even support it’s own OS X systems older than version 10.7 Lion with iCloud. The beauty of Dropbox (which usually works flawlessly notwithstanding yesterday’s troubles) is in large measure due to its platform and format agnosticism. (Google Drive sounds like it’s worth a look however). CM