CloudMagic

I, like others, am a fairly passionate proponent of preserving digital memories and information for the future. I believe the amount of information we have today – tweets, blog posts, emails, or notes – needs a unified standard to ensure it won’t get lost – forever – decades from now.

From my review of Day One:

Where the human mind can’t get, I think software can help. In the connected and post-PC era we’re living in, I believe the devices and apps we use play an important role in enabling us to create memories. But just as relevant as “content creation” has become to this discussion, we have to ensure the memories we create today will be preserved digitally for the future.

And from my personal blog:

That’s why we, today, need to invest on open standards for data conservation, hardware interoperability, and cross-platform cloud storage. In my recent article for Read & Trust, I explained how, going forward, technology makers and trend-setters will have to figure out ways to preserve and standardize how information is archived online. On the same level, we need to make sure we are creating our memories on devices, apps, and services we know we’ll be able to operate a decade from now. I don’t want to end up with another dead Nokia phone in my drawer.

This is a long-term project, but we need to invest in tools to preserve our digital lives now. I think it starts with search: there should be a platform to automatically index and archive the data from services and apps we use every day. Earlier this year I started using Cue (née Greplin) and CloudMagic, two web services that try to do exactly this – indexing and searching your “digital life” for any sort of information.

Today’s CloudMagic update for iOS made me realize I never properly mentioned the app on MacStories. CloudMagic is a free service that can index (using OAuth) a variety of other services including Twitter, Gmail, Dropbox, and Evernote. They have a human privacy policy, a clean interface, and, fundamental for my workflow, a universal iOS app. They don’t have a premium product yet, which is too bad because I would pay even a monthly fee just to guarantee the long-term viability of their product.

CloudMagic is fast: it can search across thousands of indexed items in seconds, with results updating in real time. It is astonishingly accurate, even when it has to match a couple of words with, say, hundreds of tweets from last year or an Evernote PDF inside a nested notebook. I use CloudMagic on a daily basis to retrieve old tweets (as reference material), email messages, or notes; in fact, I would say the app has better search than Evernote’s iOS app. Which, by the way, is supported with an URL scheme – so you’ll be able to search notes and open them directly in the Evernote app.

The CloudMagic app isn’t perfect – for instance, it could use an URL scheme itself and I’d love to be able to save recurring searches or, generally, have faster access to Twitter and Email filters (there are, however, advanced search operators).

CloudMagic for iOS is free on the App Store.

Update: I’m told that CloudMagic does actually have a URL scheme to start new searches: cloudmagic://search?query=foo. Useful.

Just How Fast is Fusion Drive? Macworld Benchmarks the Mac Mini

Apple’s Fusion Drive isn’t a new idea — after all, Seagate sells their Momentus XT Solid State Hybrid Drive and Corsair promises that their Accelerator Series SSD cache drives will improve the performance of your PC by augmenting existing hard drives — but it is a new option available for Apple’s latest Mac minis and iMacs. (There are notable differences between how the aforementioned products work in comparison to Fusion Drive, but they all attempt to reach the same result.)

To quickly recap, Apple’s Fusion Drive was announced on October 23rd in San Jose, California, where Apple launched an updated Mac mini, a new iMac, the iPad 4, and the new iPad mini. The Fusion Drive pairs a mechanical hard drive with a solid state drive (SSD). Traditional hard drives, while available in large storage capacities from 1 to 2 terabytes, are slow to read and write data. Apple’s implementation uses the SSD as temporary storage, where the most recently and often used apps and documents can be stored so that they load and save faster. Things on your computer that are used the least often are placed in “long term storage,” or the slower mechanical hard drive. However, the two drives (combined) will appear as one drive in the Finder — OS X handles everything for you. So why not just use a SSD (which would be simpler in setup)? While they’re much faster and (arguably) less prone to failure than their mechanical counterparts, SSDs are still very expensive. A 500 GB SSD still costs around $400, while a 1 TB mechanical hard drive costs under $100. As Macworld puts it,

…in brief, Fusion Drive is Apple’s answer to the high-price-per-gigabyte problem of solid-state drives. SSDs are fast as all get out, but they have very limited capacity and they cost a lot more than traditional drives. Fusion Drive gives you the best of both worlds by bringing together a separate 120GB SSD and 1TB hard drive and presenting them to both the user and applications as a single drive.

The benefit is clear. Fusion Drive is less expensive and offers incredible performance. Just how fast is it?

The standard configuration $799 Mac mini with its 5400-rpm hard drive took more than three times as long to complete our copy file and uncompress file tests as the Fusion Drive did in the BTO Mac mini.

Macworld’s build-to-order Mac mini, with a Fusion Drive, scored comparatively to a 15” MacBook Pro with Retina display. Impressive. And they’ve ran a gamut of tests to show that a customized Mac mini is a really fast little machine. As a side note, I personally think if someone’s thinking about dropping $1499 on a Mac mini, most people should spend a few hundred dollars more and get a 21” iMac for the display, mouse (or trackpad) and keyboard.

As for the technical implementation of the Fusion Drive, several days ago, Ars Technica went in depth on how it works using a training document as a guide. There’s a lot going on behind the scenes, and Ars writes that what makes it newsworthy is that it just works. Sounds familiar right?

If you’re a casual user and don’t care about the internals, there is nothing that you need to do to make FD “work.” You power on the system, log on, and use it. A Fusion Drive-equipped Mac leaves the factory with the operating system and all of the pre-installed applications on the SSD side, so the system is just as snappy and responsive as if it were an SSD-only Mac.

I personally wouldn’t pass up the Fusion Drive (a $250 option) if I was configuring a higher end Mac mini or a new iMac. There’s no setup of the drives themselves, and as far as you or anyone else is concerned, you still save documents and install apps the same way you always have. In the background, Apple’s Fusion Drive manages what physically goes where, how it’s handled, and when it gets offloaded to the hard drive. Apple’s Fusion Drive isn’t geek friendly — Ars Technica notes that you won’t want to “poke at or prod” the Fusion drive. This comes with caveats, such as being forced to use Apple’s Boot Camp for creating a Windows partition. It is, however, very consumer friendly, and that’s all that relatively matters when you simply want the best possible performance for the most storage.