⇥ Universal Save for iOS Apps

Federico Viticci, commenting on a piece in which Ted Landau argues that iOS needs a “Universal Save” for iOS Apps:

Specifically, Landau notes that the lack of a “universal save” option for documents that can be read by third-party apps (PDFs, text files, images) leads to an annoying and pretty much useless duplication of content.

[…]

For Ted and me, yes, being able to avoid file duplication and tedious exporting processes would be nice. But I do wonder how much does Apple care about such functionalities considering the underlying paradigms of iOS and the upcoming iCloud functionalities of iOS 5. For one, Apple really cares about application sandboxing: each app has its own controlled data environment and only a few items can be shared between multiple apps.

I’m firmly with Federico on this point. The average iOS user has no use for filesystems, files, and the concept of “saving.” That’s probably one of the biggest innovations that iOS brought forth; of course, it’s going to be unpopular with us power users, because, having learned to live almost symbiotically with our computers, we have the hardest time letting go and learning this new paradigm.

This is also a problem for developers. I see tons of threads on mailing lists where folks are desperately asking how they can get out of supporting some of Lion’s new features and keep their app’s old functionality the way it was.

That’s not the right way to go about things. If you want your app to feel at home in a new operating system¹, you have to embrace and implement the user-interface paradigms that the OS describes. This is probably the most fundamental step towards providing users with a consistent experience instead of a hodgepodge of half-baked ideas—and one step that, as a developer, you skip at your own risk.

What’s interesting is that, in my opinion, these “limitations” that we power users are complaining so much about matter very little to regular folks, as demonstrated by the great success of apps that have adopted Lion’s features in full. As sandboxing makes its way to OS X, this is going to be particularly important, because Apple gives its desktop apps much more freedom, and the addition of freedom to the ability to develop software results in a very flammable mixture.

Consider, for example, the case of 1Password. When Agile Bits released its popular software on the App Store, sandboxing forced them to introduce some seemingly arbitrary limitations on how it back its data up to DropBox. The reaction from power users was duly indignant that such limitations should be imposed on them.

The reaction from the public-at-large? 1Password quickly reached the number-two spot on the App Store. You do the math.