Brandon Ballentine

With Google, however, the philosophy is that file creation itself can be migrated to the cloud. An online office suite is “good enough,” if not as good, as a native one. And “good enough” will win due to ease of use. With almost a completely opposing view, Apple’s iCloud is doing the reverse: bringing the capabilities of the cloud to the richer, more robust native apps. This includes not just office apps in iWork, but through the use of developer APIs, it will extend to any apps that need to be iCloud-enabled. Although today, iCloud support is more limited for third-parties, the APIs will improve in time. Eventually, any app running on the Apple platform (desktop or mobile), will have the tools to move data between its different installations.

Apple’s approach makes a lot of sense to me. Their solution plays to each platform’s strengths. Native apps can offer more polished interfaces and increased performance, while the cloud can be used to enhance the user experience by offering functionality such as syncing.

I spend a good portion of my day helping instructors work within my school’s learning management system. It’s surprising how frequently browser issues cause problems for everyone. Many of these problems could be solved if a native client was available to handle the UI, local saving of data, etc. The web portion of the system could essentially be reduced to a set of APIs that would allow customers to better customize and brand the product. Just a thought …

• Tags
• Apple
• Mac
• Mountain Lion
• app
• iCloud
• web
• LMS