TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Shawn Blanc envisions a MobileMe more integral to iOS:

Imagine if you will what a merging of Dropbox and MobileMe might look like. Something simple and completely expected, I suppose. It would be free, it would sync and share info and files, and it would let other apps use it for syncing. Imagine setting up your iPhone with your Apple ID once, and then any app that has a Mac and/or iPad counterpart would sync. Sounds like mobile bliss.

That’s exactly what I’ve been hoping for since MobileMe was released: that iDisk is fully integrated into iOS, so we never have to worry about whether a file is on out phone or computer: it’s on both, automatically.

Shawn thinks Apple should make MobileMe a free service, so it can not only be the iPhone’s web-based storage, but also what applications would use to sync their user data. That’d be a dream.

Apple should do this, and I think they will. Since competition from Android is so strong, they need to make the iOS platform as strong and easy to use as possible. Currently, syncing is a weak spot for the platform; developers have no good, simple way to build syncing into their applications. They can use Dropbox, which works well, but it’s clunky to ask users to sign up for another service; they can use MobileMe, which only a small subset of their users have; or they can roll their own, which is difficult. Apple needs to do what Shawn’s proposing.