How to I access documents saved in iCloud with Mountain Lion on my iOS device

I know that I can save a pages document in the cloud in Mountain Lion and then open it in Pages for iOS, but how do I access something saved in iCloud on TextEdit or Preview.

For instance, with Preview on Mountain Lion I could save a pdf in the cloud, but is there anyway to view that pdf on my iPhone?

Is this coming with iOS 6?

Solution 1:

Although the files saved from TextEdit and Preview are actually saved in the cloud (and not just synced), they don't have corresponding iOS apps.

One of the biggest problems with iCloud is that an app can only access files in its container. There is no ability to open files from other apps. This is even more of a problem now that apps like Preview and TextEdit, which deal with generic files, are iCloud enabled.

If you are a developer, you can view all the files from all the apps stored in your iCloud account at developer.icloud.com. You can also download most of the files from there, but normal users are stuck.

So, if you only have one Mac (and any number of iOS devices), then the iCloud part of Preview and TextEdit is useless, other than that it provides another method of manually backing up a select number of files.

Solution 2:

Each app has it's own container for want of a better word, in which to store it's documents. It may well be possible for an app on iOS and OS X to both use the same container ID in order to share documents between platforms (this must be possible, apps like Day One that use iCloud Sync are able to share this way) but it's not possible for one app to access the container of another app, unless it can prove that is effectively is the same app, by having the key to the container.

In essence, you need to learn a new way of doing things if you intend to store a lot of stuff in iCloud, and for those documents that are not particularly app-specific, like PDFs, TXT files etc, then maybe deciding iCloud isn't the best host is the way forward