I recently designed an invitation for my wife’s upcoming birthday party using Apple’s Pages on Lion OS X 10.7.

Knowing that iOS can sync documents across iCloud, I thought I’d share my design with the love of my life via iCloud from Lion, foolishly thinking it would work rather like Photostream and iPhoto. It doesn’t. I’d been tripped up by the not so small print. iCloud syncs between iDevices, of which a Mac Mini running Lion is not one, despite the numerous cues Lion draws from iOS.

It turns out that the only way to do this is to manually upload the document via the iCloud website; there’s no way to upload it natively from the Lion iWork apps. You can however natively share files via iWork.com, surely Apple’s best kept secret and one that feels like it’s been in beta since woolly mammoths roamed Cupertino.

The missing links from the iWork apps on the Mac, to iCloud are a glaring omission given the foretold demise of iDisk in the middle of this year. Some Apple and third party iOS apps already have access to iCloud so it’s all the more unfathomable as to why the iWork Mac apps didn’t ship with these features and why iWork.com hasn’t been subsumed into the iCloud.

Location:Portsmouth, United Kingdom

Advertisement