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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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:
- It’s only available through the Share menu in Finder.
- 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.
- 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!
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