With Mountain Lion, iOS 6, and WWDC ’12, Apple tried to improve the overall experience for both users and developers. Months later, developers were still deeply concerned with the state of iCloud sync for third-party apps, as the APIs Apple provided turned out to be difficult to implement and unreliable at best. For one, iCloud wasn’t even natively enabled on OS X at first: Apple had to ship a software update to Lion – 10.7 was released in July 2011 – to bring official iCloud support to the desktop. Launched to much acclaim with iOS 5 in October 2011, iCloud immediately appeared as a fantastic solution to keep personal data in sync between iOS devices, but a more complex technology for third-party integration.

While that has been (partially) the case, 409 days later the results are more nuanced.įor developers, iCloud integration didn’t quite go as planned.

I concluded last year’s edition of My Must-Have Mac Apps suggesting that, with iCloud approaching its public debut and developers starting to integrate native sync in their iOS and OS X apps, “a new class of Mac software” would take us in new directions.

Must have apps for macbook pro