OS X Mountain Lion Bible

Working with Documents

OS X Mountain Lion introduces the iCloud Documents feature that lets compatible Mac applications (such as TextEdit and Preview) store files on and open files from Apple's iCloud servers, acting as an online disk drive for those documents for use by multiple Macs using the same Apple ID. Compatible applications (called “iCloud-savvy applications” in this book) let you choose between working with files in iCloud and working with them on your Mac. Chapter 8 covers this feature in detail.

As with iCloud syncing, the files in iCloud Documents are available only to the applications they are stored with; iCloud Documents does not make documents accessible to all your iCloud applications, as a cloud service such as Dropbox or Box does.

Apple has changed some of the fundamental document controls in OS X Mountain Lion. As a result, you'll encounter a variety of approaches—dialog boxes, settings sheets, and the new windows for iCloud-savvy applications (covered later in this chapter)—for document operations such as opening and saving, based on the applications' ages and their developers' pace of adoption of the new approaches. The applications that come with OS X Mountain Lion typically use dialog boxes or, if they are iCloud-savvy, windows to open files, and they typically use settings sheets to save files. That marks a departure from Apple's favoring of settings sheets for both file opens and saves in recent versions of OS X.

iCloud-savvy applications add several ...