14 DAY TRIAL // Apple has launched a new Lion beta via its software distribution channel for developers, asking the code savvy to focus their testing skills on the same core areas of the operating system as before, as well as on iCloud Document Storage.
People who are privy to the newly-seeded beta say Apple has asked them to play around with Address Book, iCal, Mail, Spotlight and Safari - all key areas of the Mac operating system that are generally the focus with each new build.
This time around, however, Mac OS X 10.7.3 build 11D36 needs testing in a new area as well - iCloud Document Storage.
According to the iOS Developer Library maintained by Apple’s software engineers, “iCloud storage is a set of interfaces and services for sharing data among instances of your app running on different devices.”
“The idea behind iCloud is to provide a single place where your app can write its data. Changes made by one instance of your app are propagated to the user’s other devices seamlessly so that the other instances of your app see them too,” reads the documentation.
“This creates a more coherent user experience by eliminating the need to synchronize data explicitly between devices or have a computer act as a hub for storing all of the user’s files and data.”
The same should apply for Mac OS X apps. And there are two ways to leverage iCloud storage, according to the company headquartered at 1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino, California.
One is Document Storage, which stores user documents and app data in the user’s iCloud account, and the other is Key-Value Data Storage, which shares small amounts of noncritical configuration data among instances of an app.
Mac OS X 10.7.3 build 11D36 was reportedly seeded with no known issues (which is generally a telltale sign that development is going as planned), and the combo update is said to weigh in at 1.25GB.
Registered Apple developers ca visit the company’s Mac Dev Center to download the latest Lion beta.