A new user recently emailed us to point out that My Docs Online, using WebDAV and the Desktop App, is working nicely as an alternative to MobileMe and iDisk, which will no longer be available after June.
Here’s what he said to us:
I just signed up for your service after evaluating many others over the last few days. Your interface seems closest to what I had with the iDisk under Apple’s Mobile Me. I upgraded to Lion and also had to find something before June 30 when the iDisk goes away.
I use the OverTheAir app for my iPhone and iPad2 to get to your site, I use the “go to server” (WebDAV) method on my OS 10.6 Mac computer and the desktop app on my Lion (10.7) Mac.
– Bud Cothern
Apple’s iCloud is very different from iDisk. iDisk is (soon to be was) a remote server that is organized like a typical drive, with a folder tree, and accessible via standard, open methods like WebDAV. iCloud is closed, and accessible only via apps using the interface provided by the operating system. It’s another outgrowth of iOS, where the location of files is generally hidden, and files are accessible from the apps that handle them. Mountain Lion for the Mac will work much the same when it is released later this year.
That means there’s no way to use the iCloud storage outside the services and apps that make use of it, such as iPhoto, iTunes Match, iWork, and AppStore apps that makes use of the iCloud Storage APIs.