Miles and miles of files

I was listening to the latest episode of the New Old Talk Show and the discussion turned to the low hanging fruit left for iOS, that is, what are the obvious features or refinements iOS will likely appear in the next version (version 6).

A good example of low hanging fruit is ‘copy and paste’. This was not available on the original iOS (on the iPhone) but introduced later as part of a major update after a good mechanism was developed.

During the show, John and Adam dished about Apple getting their own maps provider (and abandoning Google for obvious competitive reasons). While I think an improved Maps app would be fantastic – I don’t know that it’s a critical feature. They also speculated about AppleTV apps. Maybe. That doesn’t help iPhones or iPads though.

iOS 5 brought iCloud backup and PC-free activation of an iOS device. iPhones (and iPods before them) began as computer peripherals. These were devices which slurped over some of your digital media, contacts, email, etc and let you carry them around with you wherever you go. Each iteration of these devices has increased their independence on a home PC. You may still want a PC to transfer big, honking music libraries over the first time you set up your new iPhone or iPad but you don’t really need to. You can download all of your iTunes purchases right to your phone…and if you pay for the great (cheap) iTunes Match service, all of your not-iTunes music is available too. This indicates the future direction of iOS. iOS will stand alone.

New apps like Diet Coda show that iOS is fully capable of doing ‘real work’[1] and there are a great many productivity apps that let you write, organize, and create. All iOS apps, though, have the same problem: It’s very hard to share data or documents between applications. Secondarily, it’s hard to get documents out of an iPad or iPhone (shaking hard doesn’t work).

It’s fairly simple to share a single document or a photo in iOS. If you’re working on a Pages document, and you want to send that document to someone, you simply tap the ‘Share’ icon choose ‘email’ or another option. But what if you want to send a KeyNote presentation, a Pages document, a Numbers spreadsheet, and a few photos? The way iOS works now, you must launch each app separately and send each type of document in its own email. One for the Pages doc, one for the KeyNote presentation, one for the Numbers spreadsheet, and one for the photos[^fn-derp]. That’s more than a little cumbersome, and certainly not an unusual use-case.

When I last visited my family, I helped my dad move some photos from his email to a thumb-drive so he could have them printed. I would love to replace their aging Mac Mini with an iPad and bluetooth keyboard. But that simple use-case is not possible with today’s iOS. Apple’s Camera Connection Kit only works to import photos, not export, and it only works with photos and video. It’s less common now to push files around like that…but it’s still an important feature for some people. And for my dad, it means he can’t replace his computer with a simpler, easy-to-use device because it lacks that one feature.

iCloud and DropBox support make it easier to get your files from an iOS device to a PC (where you can attach all the files at once to a single email or move a file to a thumb-drive) but this doesn’t really solve the whole problem. The DropBox app can’t send multiple files in an email (though you can copy/paste multiple links to files – hardly convenient). iCloud is invisible to the user. These two solutions are competing platforms and they still require a PC to be fully useful.

This leads me to believe that in order to complete the transition of iOS to a completely independent computing platform, Apple will do one of two things:

  1. Create a ‘Documents’ app or an iCloud browser app (iCistern?) to facilitate key file sharing or transferring operations.
  2. Expand the sharing API to work two ways between apps (e.g. the Share button can now push or pull data or documents to or from receiving apps)

Option 1 breaks down the conceptual and literal sandbox around each app. One of the reasons iOS is easier for many people to learn is that apps are compartmentalized. Photos are always in your photo app. Always. Emails are always in your Email app. Always. This drives nerds nuts. Nerds know that it’s all just data under the covers and can theoretically be smooshed around…but for non-nerds this tidy compartmentalization is easy to understand and learn and easy to remember. Therefore, as much as I would love a Documents app, I don’t think we’ll see one.

Option 2 is more iOS like and is what I imagine Apple will do. I can imagine that the ‘Share’ button could now have a counterpart button called ‘Get’ or ‘Grab’ or ‘Slurp’ or similar. ‘Share’ pushes data away from the current app, ‘Get’ pulls it in. Today the Share menu is a smallish pop-over menu that typically holds a few options like ‘Email’, ‘Message’, or ‘Print’. I can imagine ‘Share’ opening a drawer like interface (like double-clicking the home button) which provides the same options as today, but also features App icons which are registered receivers of the data. Let’s say I’m in the Photos app and I want to include a photo in a document I’m writing in Pages. I tap ‘Share’ and the new Share-drawer appears. I tap the ‘Pages’ icon which reveals options like “Insert into a new document…” and “Insert into an existing document…”. The latter would let me select a document from iCloud. It’s easy to imagine ‘Share’ pushing out to a thumb-drive or other storage device as well.

‘Get’ could work the same way, but in reverse. There’s already a model for this for any app which supports importing from your photo library. A panel is made available which lists your photos. This concept could be standardized and applied to all data. If I’m in Pages, and I want to import a photo, I tap ‘Get’, tap ‘Photos’, and select a photo. If I want to import a spreadsheet as a table, I tap ‘Get’, tap ‘Numbers’ and select a spreadsheet. If further actions are required to import the selected data, the app could request those actions immediately after closing the ‘Get’ panel.

So I guess this makes this post a WWDC prediction. If I’m right, buy me a donut.


  1. Weasels who suggested you couldn’t use an iPad for ‘real work’ were paid to say so by other weasels. They have a vested interest in you not abandoning their shit-ware.  ↩

  2. I’m simplifying a bit, but other solutions are more complicated.  ↩

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