Top Right Quadrant

Three down; five letters; white and fluffy, lives in the sky

Wednesday, 20 April 2011

If you consult any number of technology news sites, you’ll be told that updates to Apple’s meagre cloud computing offering are likely to be on the horizon. Hopefully, they’re right. MobileMe woefully lags behind Google’s and even Microsoft’s cloud-sync packages in features, price and — frankly — usability (the MobileMe web apps have been highly unresponsive and sluggish as of late, to the point that I’d rather pick up my iPad than point my browser to me.com). Sure, as is standard with anything Apple, the sync experience within their own ecosystem is fine. The realisation grows, however, that it’s simply not enough.

I have no idea what iOS 5 will bring to the table. I’m no expert pundit or industry analyst (although, let’s be honest, neither are most actual analysts). But I know what I want as a consumer, and I’m not averse to telling other consumers what they want, either.

So what do I want out of MobileMe? I want it to be free. I want it to store my media. But perhaps most importantly, I want it to be open to developers.

Let’s ignore the inevitable move to a cloud-based iTunes for a minute (although having an unreliable DSL connection has presented me with a great argument against cloud reliance) and let’s not discuss the logistics of ‘free’ yet. I want to focus on the developer possibilities, and with WWDC coming up, with iOS 5 and Mac OS 10.7 taking centre stage, there’s no better time.

It’s been almost a year since Joshua Topolsky, former editor-in-chief of Engadget, penned his popular editorial in which he prayed for something he called a ‘continuous client’ — that is, the idea that you could be using your smartphone, tablet, laptop or desktop computer, step away from it, and resume whatever it was you were doing on another smartphone, tablet, laptop or desktop computer, seamlessly. Not an unreasonable bit of futurism.

Now, as successful as the App Store is and has been for many developers, it is one area where the inter-Apple product ecosystem has been frustratingly decoupled. There is this wonderful notion of a ‘universal’ iOS binary, which allows me to buy an app once and install and run that same binary on my iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad (and, one would assume, my Mac eventually. Maybe even my Apple TV, as the rumours persist). It’s the convenience behind device-independent¹ iOS apps that’s staving off the hurt the Android platform feels from its fragmentation problem.

Yet, when I buy an app that’s capable of running on all members of my iOS device family, to an extent I feel like I’m running two completely different apps because the instances of the application refuse to talk to each other. I submit to you, as an example, an app I use both on my iPad and my iPhone very often: Crosswords.

I’m on the bus one morning. I finish The Independent’s crossword for today - hooray for me! That’s a great big satisfying check mark beside that one. I get home, have some dinner. Maybe I’ll complete another before going to bed, so I grab my iPad and… wait, what’s this? The Independent’s crossword for today is ‘new’? But I did it this morning!

Sure, the creators of this particular Crosswords app have taken it upon themselves to offer a sync platform of their own. This is the best they can offer me in terms of keeping my puzzle completions up-to-date, but this is still an unacceptable solution. Am I to remember a user name and password for every single universal app² that I own?

My iPhone, iPad and Mac are already tied to a MobileMe login. Let’s open that up to developers in iOS 5. I’m not prepared to stream my music over 3G from the cloud, and neither are the mobile networks. But I would savour the ability for my Prompt server list (hell, even my sessions, why not?) to persist across devices, to retain my favourite Epicurious recipes, automatically set up my Twitter accounts when I get a new device, or to just keep track of my humble crossword completions when I get home.

To quote something Steve Jobs said on-stage at the D5 conference:

The marriage of some really great client apps with some really great cloud services is incredibly powerful.

Giving developers access to MobileMe would be one small step for word-puzzle lovers like myself, but a giant leap closer to Topolsky’s continuous client.