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Plain Cloud Gives You App-Free Access to All Documents in iCloud [Mac]

plain cloud iconWhen you use an iCloud-enabled app on your Mac, it may appear that you can only access that app’s documents from within the app itself. Actually, there is a folder structure on your Mac reflecting the location of your iCloud files, with a folder for each iCloud-enabled app that you use. You can find those folders and files outside of their native apps with a bit of effort, or you can make it easy with a free app called Plain Cloud.

Plain Cloud puts your iCloud documents a click away, and gives you a bit more freedom to work with those iCloud documents in different apps. When you have access to your iCloud folders, it’s almost like you have access to segregated Dropbox-like folders, and are free from Apple’s sandbox. You can get similar functionality without the app, but the app is free (the developer does accept donations) and makes it dead easy.

OS X Daily explains the purpose behind Plain Cloud:

Get Easy Desktop Access to All iCloud Files with Plain Cloud for OS X: “PlainCloud serves as a simple front-end to each app that stores documents in iCloud, listing out each app and letting you see just those apps files – no more hunting around in gibberish folder names to find what you’re looking for.”

The Plain Cloud window looks like this:

Plain cloud

 

Click on the name of an app, and a Finder window will open, showing you the folder containing the iCloud documents for that app. I could see this coming in handy when I want to edit a document in a different app than I used to create it. Byword files are just text files, for example, so you wouldn’t be limited to working on those files just in Byword. Have you ever created an iCloud document in one app, and edited it in another?