But for other types of document sharing - moving a file from one program to another, working on it with another person, and moving it from one machine to another - iCloud doesn't so much break down as it never works in the first place. That's fine if you're just working on a file between two computers, such as when I start a post in TextEdit on my iMac and finish it in my MacBook Air's copy of that application. (If you use Apple's iWork apps - Pages, Numbers and Keynote - you get more flexible access to iCloud files on the Web via /iwork.) You create a file in, say, TextEdit and save it in iCloud from then on, you can only see that file in other copies of TextEdit. When Apple introduced this set of Web services in 2011, you could have been forgiven for thinking iCloud would follow other 'cloud' services in looking and working like any other folder on your desktop, even as it safely stored your files in some faraway data center.īut instead of providing the sort of device-to-device synchronization you get with the likes of Dropbox, Google Drive or Microsoft's SkyDrive, iCloud operates on an app-to-app basis. Question: How do I move files from iCloud to a Mac without opening individual items in TextEdit or Preview and then moving them elsewhere?Īnswer.
