Apple iCloud To Offer True "Continuous Client" Functionality

About a year ago, Josh Topolsky (then at Engadget) posted a piece describing a cloud-based collection of push services he dubbed the "continuous client." Briefly conceptualized, a continuous client would enable a user to interact with his wares in the following way:

[W]hen you leave one device, you pick up your session in exactly the same place on the next device you use. Meaning your IM, Twitter, web browsing, applications, even your windows (given the availability of such a thing on the corresponding platform) appear just as they did on the previous device.

Fast forward to this year's iCloud bombshell (and the advertised functionality of that service), and you'll see that much of Topolsky's ideas have been in carefully-guarded Apple incubation for no short while. Specifically noteworthy, says This Is My Next's Paul Miller, is iCloud's "backup" option. Encompassing the entirety of the service's storage solution, Miller lays out Apple's game-plan thus:

Every application gets a sandbox to play with in iCloud, just like how applications currently store their own documents on an iOS device in a sandbox. Files that are placed in the sandbox get synced up to iCloud automatically, and then pulled down to other devices based on need and device capability — a Mac might pull down everything, while your iPod touch might not even have the same app so it won’t bother. But the “sandbox” isn’t just an empty Dropbox-style file folder. Apple has specific data types (and respective APIs for developers to use:

• Regular files
• Packages (a collection of files representing a document)
• Shoeboxes (a large quantity of indexed files, like iPhoto’s library)
• Preferences

For those of you ready to write all this hifalutin goodness off as practically unrealistic due to ISP caps and expensive tiered data plans, hold your horses. As with its iOS 5 OTA system update delivery, Apple is employing the Delta method for storage in the cloud, essentially clipping all created data into sections and transmitting only the changed parts. In this way (and along with Wi-Fi intranet synching), data consumption can be drastically reduced as we all enjoy iCloud access without worrying quite so much about limits and overages. At this early, untried juncture, you can be sure that the many secrets of iCloud have yet to be fully uncovered. However, you can certainly look forward to bookmark and browser synching, multi-device game-save updates, and preferences that follow your every move from Mac to iPhone to iPad and more. Mr. Topolsky, you are not dreaming!

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