I’ve been wondering a bit about the document level sandboxing issues presented in 10.8 and noting some commentary railing against the practice of keeping documents limited to a given application.
However, I’ve discovered that the multistep process of opening an iCloud document in another application can be simplified without going all the way to a generic Dropbox style shared filesystem1.
If you want to edit a Byword document in BBEdit, you do need the application. That’s a significant bar to jump since it means buying the application for both iOS and OS X. But once you’ve gotten over that hump, iCloud documents are in fact drag and droppable across applications.
If you select the Open Document in Byword, you can select iCloud (I tend to leave it there since Byword is my default cross platform editor for blog entries). From that window you can easily drag and drop to any other text editor in the dock, do what you need to to and save it back to the iCloud environment.
This paragraph was written in BBEdit after writing the rest in Byword.
And then I switched back to Byword with the updated document and all is well.
The only hiccup at the moment is that Byword on iOS doesn’t yet know how to handle folders, you so can only see documents at the root.
1 Note that I love Dropbox for what it does, but for many people the notion of a filesystem is still confusing.