In case you hadn’t noticed, computers are pretty advanced these days and they get more complex and sophisticated every day. Every year it seems more and more problems are solved and with an ever increasing variety of devices we can do more and more.
There’s one seemingly simple task with which computers have always struggled. Any guesses as to what it might be?
File and data transfers.
It’s true. Despite all the computing power in the world, transferring data from one device to another has always seemed arcane in comparison to the devices involved. Let’s step back in time for a minute to see how long we’ve been struggling with this problem.
Back when I was in high school (2002-2006) flash drives weren’t that common yet. If I created some PowerPoint or program for computer science class at home and needed to get it into school, I really had only two options: 3.5 inch floppy disks or emailing it to myself. Floppy disks failed constantly and with only 1.44MB per disk, it was often very impractical. So email must’ve been great then, right? Well, consider that Gmail wasn’t released until 2004 and even then, it was invite-only for a while. Other email services at the time offered little attachment storage and were showing their age. Many had been around for almost a decade by then. Gmail’s 1GB of free storage was unheard of. That certainly made file transfers easier, but compared to how much better computing itself was getting, it still felt arcane. If you were still on dialup (like me) uploading data was also prohibitively slow.
Fast-forward to the late 2000s and flash drives had become far more common, larger in capacity and substantially cheaper. However, were we really still saying that the only way to transfer data from one machine to another was to plug this little thing into the computer and then physically transfer it to another computer? Of course, if you had enough networking skill, you could set up a file server (as I did in college) and then hopefully be able to access those files from all the locations in which you might need them. Most people didn’t have those skills though.
This problem seems to have remained relatively unsolved over the years right up to present. Nowadays the Internet is much more solid and services like DropBox and other cloud storage services make file sharing possible even for people who don’t even know what a network is, but I can’t help but feel it’s still messy.
Well, I used to still feel it was messy, but I actually feel that Apple has solved this problem in a way that is finally on par with the elegance of the technology itself. Enter iCloud.
I use my iPad Air as a fairly capable photo and video recording device. I use an iOGrapher case and tripod and the excellent MoviePro app to get the most of out the hardware. How do I get that media off the iPad and onto my Macbook Air to be properly edited, backed up, etc? I just use iCloud. Saying I “use” iCloud almost feels disingenuous though. I turned it on once in my iPad settings, and now I never even think about it. If I take photos or videos on my iPad, I know that they’ll be on my Macbook Air. No confirmations, no network setup, they’re just there waiting for me.
I consider myself a pretty tough critic on this issue and have been very unsatisfied with the solutions available for almost 15 years, so Apple’s solution doesn’t get my praise lightly. One of the main reasons it gets my praise is that I had been using it for months and barely noticed what it was actually doing. That’s how elegant it is. It takes the complicated task of transferring data between devices and hides all of the dirty work only leaving you with the resulting solution: Your photos and videos are available on all your devices. Want a few photos on some other random (possibly non-Apple) device? Just visit https://www.icloud.com. From there you can access all your iCloud content including photos, videos, Pages, Numbers and Keynote documents, notes and any random stuff you may have stored in iCloud Drive.
So if you’ve been wary of iCloud, unsure of how it works or are still just transferring files around some other way, I urge you to try getting your devices tied together using iCloud. This is how file sharing across devices should work.