In more ways where iCloud Drive is becoming more useful and a viable replacement to Dropbox, here’s how sharing links to files stored in iCloud Drive is a pretty cool experience when you are on a Mac. Here’s a short video demo:

As you can see it’s a pretty surprising experience:

1. I’m just clicking a link from an Obsidian document. It can be any app that supports a hyperlink, there’s nothing special about this.
2. There’s no interstitial browser popup. macOS seems to figure out it’s an iCloud link, fetches it in real-time if it’s not downloaded, and opens the associated app.
3. It’s super fast, probably the fastest way to hyperlink to files on a Mac I’ve found.

Now, Creating these Links is Clunky

As you can see it’s a weird process:

1. It’s only available through the Share menu in Finder.
2. And it’s only available if you make the link publicly available to anybody. There’s no way I’ve found to easily share a link visible only to yourself.
3. I really wish there was a Google Drive-like “Copy Link” right-click item for any file in iCloud Drive.

But it’s pretty cool the way it works now, and the tight integration with macOS is a winner!