
iCloud for Developers - metaedge
https://developer.apple.com/icloud/
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jws
In the iCloud world, a user pays for his storage space directly to Apple. That
will be an interesting shift for startups. There will be no backend expenses
on a per user basis.

How to monetize the user is still wide open, but Apple will be covering the
storage and server tab. (With money added from heavy users. Casual users
needn't pay.)

The dark side of this is that there doesn't appear to be a way for a browser
or non-Apple product to interact with the stored data. So you trade free
backend servers for writing software only for Apple customers and even then
not when they sit down at a borrowed machine.

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easytiger
A cloud that cannot be accessed from everywhere and everything is not a cloud

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ddoolin
Yes it is.

It's not an open cloud. I wasn't aware there was a strict definition.

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easytiger
The word cloud is a crock and i'm not going to get into that.

But the general point of people providing online service based applications is
that from many front ends they have one back end. Having it locked down to a
platform is utterly utterly pointless and pathetically purposefully divisive.

I really am quite sure the future of modern global interpersonal
communications is utterly disastrous given the state of rival networks
fighting it out instead of working towards inter-operable-fault-tolerant-
distributed-vendor-agnostic solutions.

Email is still the best way of doing this but as Instant Messaging has shown
for the past 20 years (no standard ever caught on) without that we end up
unable to communicate reliably and one logical place with everyone. The only
thing even close has been SMS.

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gumby
> The word cloud is a crock and i'm not going to get into that.

I can't resist slightly getting into it: it was a perfectly decent metaphor
until some marketing numbskull heard a technical person use it and decided to
stretch it in ways that made it meaningless.

Back when it simply meant, "look, you push your packets into the network and a
bunch of routers decide how to get it to its destination without you having to
worry about routing" it was fine.

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easytiger
There's already a name for that: An IPv4/v6 network.

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gumby
Indeed, that is exactly the correct term.

But as a metaphor: I think Jon Postel might have been the first person I heard
use the term. I also feel like there was such a picture in some of the early
IP documents (like the internet protocol transition handbook in the early 80s)
but that stuff I had on paper and it's stuck in a box someplace.

Regardless, it's been horribly abused by marketing people and does need to be
dragged out back and put down.

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zackmorris
I wrote an iOS app using Core Data and iCloud, and it was the worst experience
I've had so far developing for the platform. From top to bottom, the Core Data
concepts are simultaneously too low-level and too opaque. I found myself
copying multi-page code snippets from the web and hoping they would work.
Basic concepts like merging conflicts were obfuscated and brittle. Contrast
that with Firebase, which has been a real pleasure to use.

So I'm hopeful that CloudKit will address these issues. Versioned schemas are
great for updates but hard to get working initially. I'm sure iCloud has a lot
of good ideas like that, but up till now they were simply too esoteric to get
a handle on, and I think the general consensus was to avoid iCloud until it
was ready for primetime.

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k-mcgrady
Although there's a lot of boilerplate to get CoreData working I've always
found it really good to work with. My guess would be that this iCloud
developer stuff builds on top of CoreData so I wouldn't expect much to change
unfortunately.

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badman_ting
They're discussing CloudKit now at WWDC. This sounds great - and could take a
noticeable chunk of business from current cloud providers. This looks like a
smart move from Apple. It only got about a minute and a half during the
Keynote, ha.

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moyaRD
CloudKit is very exciting.Appears to have a very narrow scope , IOS only App
with a simple Web service. But for those developer looking to develop only for
iPhone customers, it will be great to write all code with a single language
and single platform on the client and server. This desire exist out there with
web platform like node.js, that seek to united the discrepancy between the
client and server development in mobile applications. Will love to try this
out, and if work properly , free myself from azure/amazon EC2 in simple iOS
apps.

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k-mcgrady
Sounds like Parse but iOS only. It'll make things a hell of a lot easier for a
lot of people though. I wonder what the procedure would be if your app takes
off and you want to go cross platform.

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iambateman
Question: who owns the data stored with iCloud? Do developers still get to own
their data, or is it going to be subject to sniffing from Apple?

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plg
Unlike some other companies (FB, Dropbox, Google) Apple's business model
doesn't depend on sniffing your personal information.

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spacefight
I wonder who as a developer really loves more and more vendor lock-in than
what we already have...? Where would you store your app data for your other
platforms like Android or WP?

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vladgur
so from what I can see(and i did a very very cursory overview) , there are no
web apis for icloud :( no cross platform integration i guess

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onmydesk
iOS only. Parse it is then.

