I've been making some use of the Maple Cloud for a while now, and thought that I'd share some comments.

So far, it's been quite useful to me, and I like it. This surprised me a bit. I expected not to find it useful, and to dismiss it with an old-timer's "Bah, humbug... as useless as Maple+twitter!" But, to the contrary, I've found a use for it; a need that isn't otherwise as easily available. Basically, I use it to communicate with myself.

Here's my problem. I regularly use 4 computers on different networks: a couple at work (on a networked filesystem for which the Windowz box frequently drops its connection), a home office desktop, and a laptop. Keeping my Maple worksheets in sync, across machines, is complicated. On some of these I use some tunneling mechanisms to allow ssh, but it's a bit of a PITA to configure and fire up just so that I can do secure copy (scp) back and forth. And both my workplace and my home ISP's webmail suffer from this problem, in which XML based Maple worksheets cannot be attached without first being (g)zipped.

Sure, I could access files using other cloud-like mechanisms (web-based "office" apps, etc). But I've found that using the Cloud is easier. It's by no means perfect, but I can open and up/download worksheets in the same (only) application that runs them. So my problem is effectively solved for the subset of my worksheet use for which intellectual property sharing with Maplesoft is not a concern (see below for more on that).

I do have some issues with the Maple Cloud. Some of these may be important to others.

• The Maple Cloud terms of use relating to the intellectual property of uploaded documents
  may not always be right for you. Let me quote a paragraph,
  "By submitting, posting or displaying content through this service, you give Maplesoft a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to use, reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly display and distribute any content which has been submitted, posted or displayed on or through this service."
• Once a group is created, there doesn't seem to be any good way to show or examine its properties, let alone to change them.
• Too many documents from Maplesoft already publically available on the Cloud are in the "public" group. But the public group has become a dustbin. Couldn't Maplesoft's own submissions be better placed in a read-only group, such as Maplesoft@admin? The groups help-page says that the Maplesoft@admin group is where Maplesoft will share material, but somehow such material has all been dumped into the mess of the "public" group, using a variety of personal IDs, which makes such much harder to find.
• Could the "public" group be regularly cleaned up? It's got a lot of dubious entries in it right now -- everything from poor contributions to people's nearly empty test-items.

acer