At WWDC 2011 Steve Jobs showed to the world what iCloud was. He began with saying how 10yrs. ago people realized that the computer would become a “personal hub”, it would be where you would keep all your media. So before to get photos, music, videos, etc on your devices they had to be synced wit your Mac. But nowadays every the devices hold all types of media, and it was hard to make sure that all your devices had the media you wanted when you wanted it. So now the Mac is also going to become a device and the “personal hub” will be moved to the cloud. And Apple’s cloud will be iCloud and it will store information and push information to all your devices to maintain in sync. And it will happen seamlessly without you having to do anything. So for example you download a song on your iPad it will automatically download on your Mac, PC or any other iOS device for free. Then Steve jokes,”Why should I believe them? They’re the ones that brought me MobileMe.” Because MobileMe wasn’t much of a success. But MobileMe had three major apps Contacts, Calender, and Mail. And now Apple has rewritten those Apps from the ground up for iCloud.

Contacts: Now when a contact is made on an iPhone, the contact is pushed to the Cloud and then to the other devices. So every device attached to your Apple ID will have their contacts synced automatically.

Calenders: Same for Calenders, you make a new event or update an event on one device it is pushed to all your other devices automatically. You can even share calenders between devices.

Mail: And again you messages, inbox, folders, settings, are all synced between all your accounts at your me.com email account.

App Store: On all your devices you can view a purchase history, even if the app is not installed on your current device. But since all those Apps are synced to the cloud, you tab a button that will let you download that App onto your device from the cloud for free.

iBooks: Like the App Store you can view your purchase history, and it is all saved on the cloud so your books will automatically download to all your devices for free.

Wireless Backup: Once a day iCloud will automatically back up your device. it backs up everything including settings, music, photos, apps, books, and other information. So if you have to restore your device or you get a new one, the backup will automatically sync the device.

Documents in the Cloud:  When you use iWork on one of your devices and create a document, the document is sent to iCloud and then pushed to all your other devices. So this works with Keynote, Pages, and Numbers. And also developers get API’s to put this system into their apps for iCloud integration. And this works with Macs and PCs.

 

 

Photo Stream: So you can take a Photo on your iPhone and then be able to watch on your iPad, iPod Touch, Mac, PC, and Apple TV.. Also if you import photos on to one device it will be sent directly to all your other devices. To sync with a Mac it will send the photos to iPhoto and for PC with the Pictures Folder. And to save storage space Photo Stream it will only store the 1,000 most recent photos and for only 30 Days in the iCloud Server. To keep a photo permanently all you have to do is save it to an Album.

 

iTunes in the Cloud: So same as before buy a song, podcast, movie, tv show on one device and the purchase history is saved in the iCloud. So go to any other device and tap to download the same media for free onto that device straight from iCloud. Or as an option you can have it automatically download all purchased content on all of your devices.

 

So those are all the Apps that are a part of iCloud. iCloud is the next generation of iCloud. and MobileMe was $99 annually. But iCloud will be Free! All these amazing services Free from Apple. Their is a Developer Preview available today. And for the rest of us it will ship along with iOS in the Fall. And that’s iCloud from Apple. I think it’s really great that Apple has been able to make all these amazing features and let customers have it for free. So good on Apple.-MacMusings

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