iCloud Drive opening files with wrong app

Thanks Guys. I've now deleted MindNode from both iOS devices (6s and iPad Air). I then went to iCloud Drive on Mac and deleted all the alias files that had been created in the MindNode folder (bizarre). iCloud Drive on iOS now works as expected. I can live without iOS MindNode - the proper/expected functioning of iCloud Drive means more to me right now :-)

Cheers

Chris

Hi,

I'm the developer of MindNode and Hampshireboy mentioned this discussion in a support request and I hope I can shine some light on this issue.

iOS 9 added a new feature called "Open in Place". This means instead of copying documents into an other app's container, the receiving app can edit the document directly and the user doesn't end up with two copies of the document. MindNode adopts this new behavior. Unfortunately Apple so far doesn't support this and any other iOS 9 feature (including multitasking) in their iWork apps.

We think the problem you are seeing related to Keynote (and any other iWork app) is most likely related to the iCloudDrive.app thinking MindNode is the most likely app installed on your device capable of opening Keynote documents. The reason is that the MindNode and Keynote file format is very similar. Like Keynote we use file packages and thus inherit from the same base UTI. When iCloudDrive.app tries to find an app to open a document, it scans it's registered UTIs, sees that MindNode most likely conforms to the UTI and sends the Keynote document to it.

There is sadly no solution for this issue and we have filled a radar for this bug with Apple. And AFAIK even if we remove this feature, you would still always get the "Copy to Keynote" behavior from iCloudDrive.app until Apple fully supports "Open in Place".

The best workaround we have found is this:

1. Long press on the document in iCloudDrive.app

2. Select info from the menu

3. Click the action button in the toolbar to bring up the share sheet and select "Copy to Keynote"

Sorry that we are currently unable to provide a better solution.

Markus

iOS 9 added a new feature called "Open in Place". This means instead of copying documents into an other app's container, the receiving app can edit the document directly and the user doesn't end up with two copies of the document. MindNode adopts this new behavior. Unfortunately Apple so far doesn't support this and any other iOS 9 feature (including multitasking) in their iWork apps.

I'm not sure that's quite correct. I've experienced a number of iWork documents that open in place, so it doesn't appear that it's that the feature isn't supported but rather that in some cases it doesn't work.

I tend to think the best workaround is to open iWork documents through the appropriate iWork app, this works every time.

Interesting. We have never seen it work with iWork documents. Did you test this with documents in their main app iCloud folder or with documents in a different location inside iCloud Drive? Could be that there is a different behavior. As iCloud Drive also creates Aliases for documents opened from outside the apps iCloud folder, it could be that it's related to this feature.

I hope Apple will release major updates for the iWork apps around the time the iPad Pro ships and those updates should resolve this issue.

Cheers!

Markus

Did you test this with documents in their main app iCloud folder or with documents in a different location inside iCloud Drive?

Both, as you can see I opened the same document via iCloud Drive > Numbers and iCloud Drive > Various. You can see the parent folder name in the header.

You can also see from the header that the document has been opened in place rather than in numbers, which has a different set of tools in the header.

At first it seemed to be only documents saved from the iOS app that opened in place, however in recent testing I now note that documents saved from OS X also open in place.

Interesting. I checked the Keynote info.plist and the key LSSupportsOpeningDocumentsInPlace is not set. So in theory it shouldn't work, but it could be that once an Alias is set, iCloud Drive can open the file directly without having to copy it. As I'm unable to get it to work with any of my iCloud Drive accounts, it could be that something in my configuration is preventing it.

Cheers!

Markus