Ember and iCloud: A Quick Status Update
· Nik
Over the last few days, we’ve been working with a number of customers who’ve been experiencing problems with Ember and libraries stored in iCloud. If you’ve been affected by these problems, we’re incredibly sorry. The team has been busy working on both investigating and fixing things, so here’s a quick status update.
If you’re seeing problems with Ember, please be sure to check this in-depth support article!
Investigation
Ember uses Apple’s own iCloud / Core Data integration to sync your library. Behind the scenes, Apple’s own sync setup handles several important areas: namely, the syncing of your images and changes to your library, and assisting Ember in rebuilding your library from iCloud.
In some cases, Apple’s iCloud / Core Data service crashes behind the scenes while re-building and updating your library (and thus causes Ember to crash). However, we have a plan.
Fixing Things
It goes without saying that we want you to have confidence in saving your inspiration with Ember. We’re currently hard at work on an update to Ember that removes our reliance on the opaque iCloud integration that Apple provides, and adopts an iCloud sync solution that is not only far less fragile and tempestous, but something that allows us to consider further sync services in the future. This new solution also gives us the ability to fix things without waiting for the yearly OS X / iOS release cycle.
We know that there’s also a lot of interest in non-iCloud sync options for a variety of reasons (iCloud storage limits, personal preference, teams). This forthcoming update remains focused on iCloud, however we appreciate all your feedback about sync in Ember, and hope that our future plans will interest those of you who’d prefer other options.
So When?
We had planned to submit Ember 1.5.1 for review this week, however that was before we ran into these iCloud problems. The team is working as quickly as possible to get this sync update completed for both Mac and iOS and we’ll be keeping you in the loop about its progress.