![]() On the positive side, they naturally have full CRUD operations available both offline and online. The sync clients have the opposite characteristics. On the other hand, this approach has two major drawbacks, 1) offline operations can’t be done on the files and 2) since most operations are performed directly against the service, the performance is limited to the speed of the network rather than the speed of the local storage on the device. Because of this design choice, these apps are well suited to small storage devices such as phones or tablets. can be done in a dynamic way and the cache can be managed independently of the core logic. Caching items like thumbnails, tree structure, etc. There is no need to download the full body of the files in order to browse the collection of files. The apps are able to browse very large data sets relatively quickly because the JSON API lets them ask for any view of the tree independently. ![]() The design used by the apps is good because it allows them to have a small footprint on the device. There are pros and cons to each engineering approach. The image below shows the SkyDrive app on Xbox 360, built on the JSON API ( watch the video). This design is helpful because we strive to make the feature set be consistent across all endpoints. In fact the SkyDrive apps browse the hierarchy of files and folders in SkyDrive via the same JSON API used by the SkyDrive website. The apps communicate with the SkyDrive service using a stateless JSON API in a design pattern similar to a website. Before Windows 8.1īefore Windows 8.1, our engineering designs fell into two major categories, apps and sync clients. All of this work prepared us for this past year when we set out, together with experts in the Windows team to bring the best of all SkyDrive experiences to Windows. Over the course of several updates to these apps we have learned how people want to access their files from their devices, what features matter most on each device, and also of course the unique set of development challenges and opportunities these different platforms offer. This was a great learning experience for our team. We also released sync clients that perform two-way synchronization of files to the SkyDrive service on Windows 8/7/Vista as well as on Mac OSX. We released apps for Windows Phone, Xbox, iOS, Android, and a Store app for Windows 8. In the past two years leading up to our work in Windows 8.1, our team built and released several SkyDrive apps on all major platforms. ![]() The other half of the team, called SkyDrive Cloud Services, is responsible for building the web service that powers these experiences. ![]() Our team, called SkyDrive Devices & Roaming is responsible for building the client software that is the expression of SkyDrive on all devices, including Windows tablets and PCs. My name is Adam Czeisler and I am the Development Manager for one half of the SkyDrive team in Windows Services. This blog post is part of a series of guest posts we’re publishing this week from different people in groups across Microsoft who helped us build Windows 8.1. ![]()
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