Zentrope

Documents in iCloud

From what I can figure out, the idea of documents in iCloud is that you start up an application on your Mac, select the document you want to edit from a list and then start working. All your changes are saved to the server and synced to other devices. Great stuff.

But doesn’t the notion that you get to your documents by opening Pages (say) seem like a step backwards?

My projects often consist of a document, a diagram or two from Omnigraffle, other images, text files, supporting PDFs and web-links. I store them all in a single folder named after my project.

This arrangement puts the focus on my project rather than on applications and keeps all the elements that get “compiled” into my “publication” in one, self-contained package. I can open the folder, click on a web-link (opened by Safari), or click on an image (opened by Preview). I can open the document itself in Pages, drag in and place the image, or cut/paste a diagram from Omnigraffle. The folder is the content, the applications merely helpers. Data processors.

Is this new world, where documents are stored in apps like email messages in Mail.app, or contacts in Address Book, throwing out the data-centric model?

I suspect not.

You’ll be able to drag documents from an application’s chooser into a folder to organize things in a data-centric way, same as always. At best, the object in the folder is really a pointer to the application’s data-store (or at least contains such a thing) such that when you open the app, the document is synched to iCloud and shows up in the app’s document list just the same as it normally would. Optionally, an app might have a concept of a project into which you can drag objects from other apps.

Here’s what I’m going to love about the new paradigm: not everything I write in Pages is part of a project: blog entries, notes, research, how-to docs. When I need to write something down, I do, but then comes the question: Where can I store it so it doesn’t get mixed in with a lot of documents from other sorts of apps? What keywords do I add so that a Spotlight doesn’t find a whole host of stuff I don’t need when I know I’m interested in a document? Wouldn’t it be nice if, like Notational Velocity backed by SimpleNote, I could have a big list of docs inside Pages I could search through? Ever since I watched the WWDC keynote, I’ve been self-conscious of how I use my computer and how much (admittedly minor) stress I produce for myself thinking about organizing stuff that really doesn’t need organization. This new paradigm of applications managing the content they enable is the right sensible default.