(via @atul)

It’s been two weeks since iOS 5 and iCloud became available for developers and to be honest I’ve been busy playing with iOS 5 and haven’t seen much of iCloud until now.

The first thing I remember was the setup, after installing iOS 5 it prompted me to enter my Apple ID and enable iCloud. After that, the only thing I tried was backing up my devices to the cloud, which still freaks me out a bit, since everything is in a hard drive in the sky. The process was very seamless, turned on the option and it just worked, or at least I think it worked. After the first backup, you can go deeper into the settings and select which app’s data you want to keep and which ones you don’t.

The second feature I noticed was the cloud icon in iTunes store which shows up on apps you have purchased on a different device, which brings me to the next point. Now both music and app store show a “purchased” category, where you can see your entire purchase history, it even has a “Not On This iDevice” tab to make it easy to see what your missing.  Tap the cloud icon next to the song or app and your iDevice immediately starts downloading. You can download previously purchased songs and apps, even if you bought them on another iDevice or iTunes. Yeah, it’s kind of a pain in the ass, which is what Stevie was saying “keeping all our devices in sync is driving us crazy.”

This next feature will make synchronizing a cinch. In the new iTunes 10.3 and the latest non beta iOS 4.3.3 devices, you can turn on Automatic Downloads for music, apps, and books. With this option on, anything you buy on one device, say your iPhone, will automatically appear on your other devices (Mac, iPad, etc.), keeping all devices in sync. The only problem I see is you might not want to have every app on all your devices, but that’s easily solved by deleting it from the device you don’t want it on.

What else is cool? Photo Stream, it just works. Take a picture with your iPad and it shows up on your iPhone, what else do I need to say? Well, actually I think it would be even cooler if it allowed me to share a stream or photo album with other users, now that would be awesome!

Things I haven’t been able to test: Documents in the cloud and calendar sharing. I can’t seem to find the way to share a calendar with another iCloud user. As for Documents in the cloud, Pages didn’t prompt me to use iCloud for storage like was seen during the Keynote and there’s no sign of the feature in the app. So I don’t know, maybe they haven’t enabled that feature yet?

In response to Lauren Carlson‘s Can Apple iCloud make it rain in the Enterprise? From what I’ve seen and what we know of the way iCloud is setup, my answer would have to be not yet. Unless you are, at the very least, able to share documents with other users through iCloud, it won’t be adopted in a business environment. This is something that undoubtedly will come, if not from Apple, from third party developers now that the iCloud APIs are available.

What do I think so far? Honestly, I’m still processing. It’s hard to asses something when I’ve only seen half of it, but what I’ve seen so far, I like…

(via @9to5Mac)

Apple is working on a new notification system for iOS and will be buying a small company to build its technology into the operating system, according to one of our sources.

Our source, who asked to remain anonymous, didn’t know the identity of the company, except it already has an iPhone app in the App Store.

Not sure how good their source is, but with copy/paste and multitasking out of the way, it does make sense that notifications are now at the top of Apple’s to do list.

For me, notifications are my single (only?) biggest issue with iOS. When I see others with their Android devices, I laugh, but I’ve always been jealous of those WebOS notifications. As this is a major overhaul to iOS, like copy/paste and multitasking, we won’t hear anything from Apple about this until iOS 5 is announced at a special event in March / April or WWDC in June.

Just wanted to wish all our When Will Apple readers a happy and safe New Year! Lots of new Apple release around the corner, so we’ll be adding some new release date polls early next year. I’m thinking we could start with the Verizon iPhone (since it finally seems like the real deal this time), then move to the iPad 2, then iPhone 5…and I’m sure there will be other little surprises along the way!

(via @shawnblanc)