iCloud… what I think so far
by Chiyin on Jun 22nd, 2011 @ 11:59 am
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…
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Apple Store, Apples & Oranges, iCloud, iOS 5, iPad, iPhone, iPod, iTunes, OSX
Hack to get AirPrint back in OS X 10.6.5
by Justin Horn on Nov 11th, 2010 @ 12:53 amThe files you need are:
/usr/libexec/cups/filter/urftopdf
/usr/share/cups/mime/apple.convs
/usr/share/cups/mime/apple.types
If you migrate those from a 10.6.5 prerelease build (there seem to be many floating around torrent sites and file sharing sites – build 10H542 works; naturally I can’t link you to the files themselves, sorry!) to your machine you’re just one step away from having AirPrint working.The final key thing is you have to remove and re-add your printer in the Print & Fax preferences pane. Once you do that (and share your printer in the Sharing preferences pane) it should show up on any iOS devices that support AirPrint.
Still don’t understand why Apple would remove this, but at least there is a work around…if you can get your hands on the beta files.
(via iClarified)
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What Steve Jobs does to old technologies, the death of Mac OS9
by Justin Horn on Apr 29th, 2010 @ 3:58 pmI would love to see them do this to flash at the WWDC 2010.
(via @counternotions)
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Apple vs ?, Humor, OSX
WWDC 2010 announced for June 7 – 11
by Justin Horn on Apr 28th, 2010 @ 9:20 amLooks like Gruber was right, WWDC 2010 was announced today for June 7 – 11th. So we only have to wait about 5 weeks to get the rest of the details on the 4th gen iPhone hardware, and any new OS 4 updates that only apply to the new hardware.
(via TiPb)
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Snow Leopard poll complete…finally!
by Justin Horn on Aug 26th, 2009 @ 11:10 amOur longest running poll on When Will Apple, when will snow leopard be released, has finally come to an end. A few months ago Apple sort of announced a release date, “September”, so we decided to start up a new poll with just that month. So what does Apple do? …they pull a fast one and release it early. So we rounded up all the eligible entries and pick one lucky winner at random.
So Jasonstar7 come on down!
Read more about the Snow Leopard release on the poll page here.
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OSX
