Reprinted from TidBITS by permission; reuse governed by Creative Commons license BY-NC-ND 3.0. TidBITS has offered years of thoughtful commentary on Apple and Internet topics. For free email subscriptions and access to the entire TidBITS archive, visit http://www.tidbits.com/ Cloud Mate Brings Its Magic to Your iPhone Matt Neuburg Last month, I described Cloud Mate ('[1]Cloud Mate: Turning iCloud into Dropbox?,' 4 April 2013), which, within a single application, gives you a conspectus (I love that word!) of all the documents kept in the cloud by all your iCloud-savvy applications. Since then, the developers, Red When Excited, have not let the grass grow under their feet. They have greatly improved the Cloud Mate interface on your Mac; even more amazing, they have provided a version of Cloud Mate that works on your iPhone ' which should be completely impossible. I'll describe some of the desktop improvements, and then I'll explain how Cloud Mate for iOS makes the impossible possible. Recall that Cloud Mate on the Mac works by looking directly at the contents of the Mobile Documents folder in your home Library, portraying those contents in a user-friendly way and allowing you to manipulate them. The current version, Cloud Mate 1.5.1, is even more user-friendly. In my previous article, I lamented that Cloud Mate's window portrayed the documents in icon view only; now, there's also list view and column view. I also pointed that Cloud Mate's Quick Look feature wasn't really the same as the system-based Quick Look; now it is. And I said something about certain Finder keyboard shortcuts not working in Cloud Mate's Finder-like interface; now they do. Gosh, it's almost as if the developers had read my review! Doubtless there are many further improvements that I've missed, but unfortunately the developers don't seem to maintain a public list of their release notes. [2][tn_cloudMateListView.jpg] The really big news, though, is that Cloud Mate also works on the iPhone. The iPhone version, in addition to listing non-Apple cloud-based service to which you may be subscribed, such as Dropbox, Evernote, and Google Drive, also lists your iOS apps that are keeping documents in the cloud, as well as your desktop iCloud-savvy applications. [3]Image When you tap the name of an application, you're shown a list of the folders and files that it's keeping in the cloud. [4]Image When you tap the name if a file, you're shown a preview of that file's contents, along with information about the file such as its name, size, and modification date. You can also delete or rename the file, move it to a different folder (including the cloud folder of a different application), or perform any of the various Share functionalities, such as mailing it, printing it, previewing it with Quick Look, or opening it in some other app that handles this type of file. [5]Image Like the Restaurant At the End of the Universe, everything I just said is impossible. Cloud Mate can work on the Mac, because your cloud-based documents are just documents stored in a particular location (the Mobile Documents folder) whose contents are automatically mirrored to and from the cloud. But on the iPhone, every app is sandboxed; it can see only its own documents. So how on earth can Cloud Mate on the iPhone possibly know what other cloud-based apps you have, let alone what documents those apps are keeping in the cloud, and (even more amazing) what the contents of those documents look like? The answer is concealed in the preceding paragraph. Cloud Mate on the iPhone is sandboxed, like every other app. But Cloud Mate on the Mac is not! Therefore, Cloud Mate on the Mac collects the information about your various cloud-savvy apps and their cloud-based documents and shares that information with Cloud Mate on the iPhone. And how does it do that? Using iCloud, of course! Cloud Mate on the Mac and Cloud Mate on the iPhone are both iCloud-savvy, so they have a shared folder where they can communicate by way of the cloud. Cloud Mate on the Mac creates a description of your cloud-based documents and puts it into its own cloud-based folder (inside the Mobile Documents folder); Cloud Mate on the iPhone pulls that description out of its cloud-based folder and uses it to create those lists of apps and documents, as well as the metadata describing each document. That's ingenious, but I'm not finished, so hold on to your hat. I have not yet explained how on earth Cloud Mate on the iPhone is able to show you a preview of the contents of a cloud-based file, as well as handing that file off to various other apps and services. The answer is that Cloud Mate's information about each cloud-based document includes not only its name, size, and modification date, but also the URL of its storage location at www.icloud.com. Thus, when you tap on the name of a document, Cloud Mate does effectively the same thing that Dropbox does when you tap on the name of a document in the Dropbox app ' it downloads the document from the cloud! Indeed, the comparison between Cloud Mate and Dropbox, which I used in my earlier review of Cloud Mate for Mac, turns out to be even more apt with regard to Cloud Mate on the iPhone. What Dropbox user hasn't wished that iCloud, with its world of documents in the cloud, behaved more like Dropbox? With Cloud Mate on the iPhone, it does! Instead of having to resort to an individual app and its interface to view and manage the documents belong to that app alone, you can manage all your cloud-based documents in one location, regardless of what application they belong to, and regardless of whether it's a Mac application or an iOS app. Take, for example, the JPG picture of Anton Diabelli shown in the screen shot above. It 'belongs' to the Preview application on the Mac. So how would I hand it to GoodReader on the iPhone? Well, starting on the Mac, I might select it in Preview, press the Share button, email it to myself, change to the iPhone, check my mail, find that message, tap the JPG enclosure, and elect to open it in GoodReader. But with Cloud Mate, I can work entirely on the iPhone! The picture of Diabelli is visible there, and I can use the share button to open it in GoodReader in a single step (or I can even move it directly from Preview's cloud folder to GoodReader's cloud folder). And the fact that I can also access Dropbox itself directly within Cloud Mate is a kind of super-bonus. There is, of course, one important caveat: in order to get started with Cloud Mate on iOS, you need to be running (or, at least, to have run) Cloud Mate on the Mac. Cloud Mate on iOS is sandboxed, so it can't see any cloud-based documents but its own. Cloud Mate on the Mac is not sandboxed, so it does the initial heavy lifting of discovering what cloud-savvy apps you've got and what documents they are keeping in the cloud. On the other hand, once Cloud Mate on the Mac has performed that initial task of discovery, and once it has created the sync information in its own cloud-based documents folder, Cloud Mate on the iPhone can keep up with any changes that you make on the iPhone, such as renaming, deleting, or moving a document. I'm personally lost in admiration for the cleverness and ingenuity of the iOS version of Cloud Mate. I'm also naturally unable to resist a certain measure of pessimism. Cloud Mate is clearly doing something that Apple would rather it not do. How long is it going to be before the sleeping gorilla rolls over and crushes Cloud Mate with a fist full of lawyers? I have no idea. But I can tell you this: until that happens, for one brief shining Camelot-like moment, iCloud's documents in the cloud is working in exactly the nimble, user-compliant way in which Apple should have made it work all along, both on the desktop and on iOS. And I, for one, intend to enjoy it while I can! [6]Cloud Mate for iOS costs $3.99 at the [7]iOS App Store, and requires iOS 6. [8]Cloud Mate for Mac, which is needed in order for Cloud Mate for iOS to see your iCloud-based documents, costs $6.99 from [9]Fastspring, and requires Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion. References 1. http://tidbits.com/article/13679 2. http://tidbits.com/resources/2013-05/cloudMateListView.png 3. http://tidbits.com/resources/2013-05/cloudMateiOS.png 4. http://tidbits.com/resources/2013-05/cloudMateios2.png 5. http://tidbits.com/resources/2013-05/cloudMateios3.png 6. http://www.rwe-uk.com/app/cloud-mate-ios 7. https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/cloud-mate/id623799272 8. http://www.rwe-uk.com/app/cloud-mate 9. http://sites.fastspring.com/rweuk/product/cloudmate .