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Over a decade after Apple took its first shot at the web with iTools, the company still doesn’t have a decent, trustworthy product.

Beside the controversy this week about iCloud ability to deliver worthy APIs to developers, other people stated that their is two iCloud: APIs part for developers and what the end user see of iCloud like Mail, Calender, icloud.com. Besides iCloud syncing problems at time, there is one feature that I see criticial and that is missing: a file system.

iCloud in Mountain Lion open and save dialog boxes shows essentially a flat space with documents in it. In other words, there is no file system in iCloud storage. I guess the design choice behind this is to keep things simple. Current computers startup UI are essentially to present a windows on a file system. But the computer is not a file system. So the paradigm shift seems to be compelling.

The problem is when you have more than 10 documents in iCloud for a specific application, looking for the one you want becomes tedious. This render iCloud storage problematic. And I think this is the kind of problem we see often in Apple applications: they don’t scale well at certain usage level (i.e. power users). Another example of this is the iOS application Photos.app. There is no hierarchy for organizing hundreds of photos except for albums. I find it problematic when you are looking for a specific set of pictures.

I guess Apple wants to simplify the computing experience but the thing is, for many of us who are using computers since before the iPhone, we all know and basically understand folders and documents. Apple shouldn’t have eliminated this from iCloud’s document storage. Maybe in iCloud 2.0, who knows.

What? According to Brent Simmons, as a developer, you shouldn’t rely on others to implement the server part of your mobile apps. But is this the same thing on relying on other apps on a daily basis? Non sense. 

It may be very enlightening to learn web services plumbing and create back end services but one cannot do everything. There is a limit to what a single person or a small team can do.

Apple, Google and the like are liable of their offerings. We, as customers, must put pressure on them in order to keep improving their services. Remember, we vote with our money.

“It Just Works”. Mmm. Ok. “It Just Works, most of the time, for most people”. 

The Verge comments on iCloud performance are harsh. They fail to make a big difference in what developers are using to interact with iCloud (APIs) and what the users are seeing and experiencing with iCloud. Big difference.

APIs must be working for some because Apple is able to create apps that take advantage of them like the just released Podcasts apps which will sync settings from one device to another via iCloud.

Nonetheless, Apple’s track record with online services are less than stellar I must admit. iTools? Slow. .Mac? Slow and limited features. MobileMe? Sync problems and stability issues. iCloud? Lack of features people take for granted like a visible file system. But wait, what about the App Store, the iTunes Store? These are online stores that are used by millions of people and are doing fine.

So what is the problem? Apple cannot do everything well and this is why I still wonder why they just don’t buy Dropbox. They would get instant access to man power for fast et stable online services and multiplatform document-based syncing.

What a brilliant piece from iMore’s Rene Ritchie. iCloud is the future badly implemented at the user end but Dropbox greatly implemented at the back end.

Did you know that Steve Jobs offered to buy Dropbox? That was before iCloud. They came out with something that don’t match Dropbox service so we can’t say hat Apple decided to implement it themselves.

Interesting comments by John Gruber. The next area where Apple must invest for iCloud is on the backend side with great APIs where developers will find a clean and easy way to hook up theirs apps and services. 

Update: Yep, many developers seems to confirm this point of view.

The requested features by this guy are legitimate. I do wish Apple would provide a way to better serve family setup of iDevices usage. The root of the problem is the fact that we use Apple ID for everything Apple: make purchase from the App Store, from the iTunes store, from the iBookstore, etc. Buying stuff is something. Sharing stuff is quite another.