[HN Gopher] From Cyberdog to dataless files: a brief history of ...
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       From Cyberdog to dataless files: a brief history of iCloud
        
       Author : ingve
       Score  : 32 points
       Date   : 2023-08-05 18:35 UTC (4 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (eclecticlight.co)
 (TXT) w3m dump (eclecticlight.co)
        
       | Philadelphia wrote:
       | Cyberdog was a web browser/Internet application suite like
       | Netscape. If it's the spiritual predecessor to anything, it's
       | Safari, not iCloud, but I wouldn't say it was even that. It was
       | really just a tech demo. From what I remember, it was just barely
       | functional. It was something you'd run after you installed
       | OpenDoc and say "that's neat" about and then never touch again.
        
         | jwells89 wrote:
         | I remember using Cyberdog some in the late 90s, and what I saw
         | most often is that it'd work fine for a while (as long as all
         | the sites you visited were text and images with nothing fancy),
         | and then start stalling when loading pages. Of course that
         | might've just been the flakiness of the 28k dialup connection
         | the house was on back then, but Netscape 3.x and 4.0.1 from the
         | same era didn't exhibit that behavior as often.
        
         | Q6T46nT668w6i3m wrote:
         | Cyberdog also included a handful of apps that were annoying to
         | install on the Mac in 1996: contacts, e-mail, FTP, newsgroups,
         | etc.
        
           | Philadelphia wrote:
           | There were actually a lot of good freeware and shareware apps
           | for most of that -- things like Eudora for e-mail, Fetch for
           | FTP, and NewsWatcher for NNTP.
        
             | Q6T46nT668w6i3m wrote:
             | For sure. Cyberdog, for a brief moment, made it easy to
             | find and install alternatives to Cyberdog!
        
       | antonkar wrote:
       | The worst thing about iCloud Drive - if you keep files in it,
       | your iPhone can remove the local copy any time.
       | 
       | So if you want your files to be synced and to be 100% sure you'll
       | have a local copy - you should keep the same file in iCloud Drive
       | and in the "On My iPhone" folder. This is the reason Apple Books,
       | Numbers and all the apps that use iCloud Drive remove local
       | copies all the time.
       | 
       | I made a simple note-taking app using iCloud Drive - iCloud was
       | greedily removing a 2 kb txt-file when the app was closed
       | (sometimes it wasn't - it's quite random). It doesn't matter if
       | you have a lot of storage space - iCloud still can remove the
       | local version of a file you constantly use.
       | 
       | The Apple developer support said nothing can be done. Even for a
       | developer there is no way to mark a file as never to be removed
        
         | baz00 wrote:
         | This got me when I was in the middle of nowhere abroad
         | airgapped. The file I wanted wasn't there.
         | 
         | Switched to OneDrive and android now. Keep offline works.
        
       | jasoneckert wrote:
       | Am I missing something here, or did the author forget to discuss
       | "dataless files" after mentioning it in the title?
        
         | mistercow wrote:
         | Yeah, I'm wondering that too. That was the hook I was
         | interested in.
        
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       (page generated 2023-08-05 23:00 UTC)