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Take Control of iCloud
Understand the features, get set up, and enjoy iCloud!
iCloud may seem simple, but astonishing complexity lurks below the surface, especially for those who have relied on Apple's Internet services for years. In this essential title from best-selling author Joe Kissell, you'll learn what hardware and software you need to set up and use iCloud successfully on Macs, iOS devices, second- and third-generation Apple TVs, and Windows-based PCs. Whether you're starting from scratch or upgrading an existing MobileMe account, Joe has the advice you need to get started.
With setup completed, Joe explains the key aspects—and hidden gotchas—of iCloud's core features: iTunes in the Cloud (including iTunes Match), iCloud Backup, Photo Stream, Documents in the Cloud, Find My iPhone, Mail, Contacts, Calendars, and more. Also problematic are Apple IDs, and Joe explains how to work around problems with shared Apple IDs, non-email Apple IDs, multiple Apple IDs, MobileMe Family Pack accounts, and more.
For many, the prospect of moving from MobileMe is worrying. While some MobileMe services transition seamlessly to iCloud, others disappear as you upgrade, and still more will limp along through to June 30th, 2012. To smooth your transition, Joe outlines what will happen to different MobileMe services, and for those that are going away—like Gallery, iDisk-based file sharing and Web hosting, Mac-to-Mac syncing, and Backup—he suggests alternatives.
- More Info
- Contents & Intro
- What’s New
- FAQ
- Blog
Take Control of iCloud will teach you how to handle many aspects of iCloud, including:
- iCloud Web site: Learn what you can and can't do in iCloud's Web-based interface for Mail, Contacts, Calendar, Find My iPhone, and iWork documents.
- iTunes in the Cloud: Learn how to turn on automatic downloads so nearly anything you buy from Apple—music, apps, and ebooks, though not TV shows or movies—appears on all your devices. You'll also learn how to re-download previously purchased items, and you'll read about how to start using Apple's optional, $25-per-year iTunes Match music service.
- iCloud Backup: Find out what data on your iOS device backs up, how to handle your backup, and—most importantly—how to restore your backup after a problem!
- Photo Stream: Having all your recent photos appear on all your devices sounds great, but there are gotchas. Joe explains how the 1,000-photo and 30-day limits work, as well as what's necessary to get a truly embarrassing photo out of your Photo Stream.
- Documents in the Cloud: Start changing your habits and expectations as your documents begin living in the cloud and within apps instead of on a local disk. But beware, since Documents in the Cloud isn't always seamless, with both manual effort required and data loss possible at the moment.
- Calendar and Contacts: Find directions for working with iCloud's Calendar and Contacts Web applications, along with pointers on the relatively few ways they differ from the Mac's iCal and Address Book and from iOS 5's Calendar and Contacts apps. Learn how to handle invitations to calendar events, plus get guidance on how reminders work within iCloud's calendaring system.
- Mail: As with Calendar and Contacts, Joe explains how to set up and use iCloud's Web-based Mail app, which is similar to the iOS Mail apps.
- Find My...: Learn how to use Find My iPhone/iPad/iPod touch/Mac to locate a device that's gone missing, and get an overview of how you can keep track of friends and family with the new Find My Friends iOS app.
- Back to My Mac: With Back to My Mac, you can connect to your Mac at home or the office over the Internet and use both file sharing and screen sharing just as though you were on the same network. Joe explains the basics.
Read this book to learn the answers to questions such as:
- What are iCloud's primary features?
- How do I set up iCloud-based calendar and contact syncing on my iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch?
- How do I share calendars with people who are not using iCloud?
- How quickly should I expect iCloud to sync my data?
- How do I configure my email software to use my iCloud email address?
- How do I add files to my Photo Stream from Windows?
- How can I configure my AirPort Extreme to work with Back to My Mac?
- What should I expect iTunes to do immediately after I turn on iTunes Match?
And for those making the jump from MobileMe, the book also explains:
- How iCloud's feature set compares to MobileMe's.
- Which of MobileMe's features will disappear instantly once you upgrade to iCloud, and which will stick around until June 2012, when Apple has announced it will shut off MobileMe.
- The best ways to handle old data stored on MobileMe, such as photos in Web Galleries and files in iDisk, and what alternatives you can use to replace that functionality.
- What to do if you have multiple Apple IDs, shared Apple IDs, a MobileMe Family Pack, or a non-email Apple ID, and how to associate your primary email address with the desired Apple ID.
- The best ways to replicate MobileMe-based group calendar sharing in iCloud, especially if not everyone you share with can upgrade to iCloud.
Book Info
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About the Author
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Book Reviews
Author Interviews
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Joe Kissell has written numerous books about the Macintosh, including many popular Take Control ebooks. He's also Senior Editor of TidBITS and a Senior Contributor to Macworld, and previously spent ten years in the Mac software industry.
Table of Contents
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Read Me FirstiCloud is the latest incarnation of Apple’s suite of Internet services, in the lineage of MobileMe, .Mac, and iTools. Although iCloud is designed to be largely invisible in everyday use, setting up all its related components optimally can be a challenge, and you may need to learn new ways of thinking about your data. This book helps you make sense of iCloud, configure it for your needs, and form new habits that will enable you to get the most from the service. Take Control of iCloud was written by Joe Kissell, edited by Tonya Engst with help from Dan Frakes, and published by TidBITS Publishing Inc. |
Introduction
It seems like I’ve been here before. Three years ago today I was writing a book about MobileMe, and three years before that I was writing a book about .Mac. I didn’t write a book about .Mac’s precursor, iTools, but I could have done so four years earlier still. I’m starting to feel a certain rhythm to the way Apple revamps its online services—it’s one of those things I’ve come to expect about as often as the Olympics or presidential elections. Lots of other people who are feeling the same thing are approaching the advent of iCloud and the demise of MobileMe with a sort of “here we go again” attitude.
iCloud is indeed both a new name and a new collection of services in the lineage of MobileMe, .Mac, and iTools. I wouldn’t be so foolish as to predict that it’s the ultimate iteration, or that it will still be around in its current form five years from now. But one thing is clear: iCloud is dramatically different from any of its predecessors. It represents not merely a shift in service offerings but a fundamental change of strategy for Apple. It’s a big deal, and I have a feeling that many MobileMe users are going to have some trouble wrapping their heads around the New World Order.
Here’s a quick quiz. Can you name all the features from the original iTools, launched in January 2000, that still exist in iCloud? There are only two. First is email: iCloud gives you a full-featured email account in the me.com domain; iTools included accounts with the mac.com domain name. (Those who have stuck with the service since its earlier days can still use their mac.com addresses.) The second “feature” is more subtle. It’s the price: iTools was free, and so is iCloud; both .Mac and MobileMe required a paid subscription. Other than those two things, iCloud is utterly and completely different from Apple’s initial vision of what an Internet-based service should be.
Much has been said (and I’ll say more) about the loss of MobileMe services people had come to depend heavily on, such as iDisk and Mac-to-Mac syncing of certain personal data. But what I find even more significant is the new philosophy underlying iCloud—the concept that your documents, music, photos, and other data should propagate to all your devices so immediately and automatically that you never even think about where your data is anymore. It’s everywhere; why wouldn’t it be? In this model, syncing becomes a distant, unhappy memory, and users are largely freed from worrying about files as such. You simply go about your daily activities, like taking photos or creating spreadsheets or buying TV shows, and wherever you go, there they are.
What could be easier? Hey, problem solved! No need for a book about it, or even an article. Flip the switch and everything just works.
Indeed, that may be exactly the experience of new iCloud users without years’ worth of files, Web pages, and habits created under the model that Apple has now decided is obsolete. The rest of us face some challenges. First, we have to figure out which portions of our stuff can be moved to the new system and safely transition those bits, while finding new homes for the other bits (or ways of living without them). And second, we must understand iCloud’s different way of thinking about data and come to grips with the changes in behavior it will require. But having done these things, we can go a step further—we can explore entirely new ways of using our digital devices that were either impractical or even unthinkable before. Better still, we can learn how iCloud enables us to focus more on the tasks, objects, and people at hand than on hardware and software. That has to be a good thing.
In this book, I explain what iCloud is, discuss setting it up and transitioning from MobileMe, and then walk you through each major feature in turn. I breeze lightly over the more obvious parts of iCloud but spend a bit more time talking about elements that may be more confusing or harder to discover on your own. Along the way, I hope to show you not only how features work—after all, many of them truly are self-explanatory—but how best to think about them, and how to think about your needs and tasks in the context of the new Apple ecosystem of which iCloud is a part.
Because iCloud works best with Apple hardware, that’s what I focus on here. Recent-vintage Macs, iOS devices (iPhone, iPad, iPod touch), and the Apple TV are the best tools with which to experience iCloud. I do touch on iCloud in Windows, too, but I say pretty much nothing about other platforms (such as Linux and Android) where you can’t do much with iCloud beyond accessing a handful of features in a Web browser.
iCloud Quick Start
Although you can skip around freely in this book to learn about the topics that interest you most, I strongly encourage you to read (or at least skim) the first two chapters—Get to Know iCloud and Set Up and Explore iCloud—before moving on to the rest. Those chapters provide important foundational information, without which much of the material later in the book may not make sense.
Get started:
- Learn about iCloud features in Get to Know iCloud.
- Set up your Mac, PC, and iOS device(s) to use iCloud, and learn how to use the iCloud Web site. See Set Up and Explore iCloud.
Use the core iCloud features:
- Use iTunes in the Cloud, and related capabilities for other media, to access your purchases everywhere. See iCloud Downloads.
- Learn how iCloud can back up and restore crucial data from your iOS devices with iCloud Backup.
- Make sure your recent photos are available on all your devices with Photo Stream.
- Use Documents in the Cloud to keep documents up to date everywhere.
- Manage your address book using Contacts.
- Keep track of your schedule and reminders with Calendar.
- Send and receive email with Mail.
- Locate a wayward Mac or iOS device, or find a friend or family member. See Find My Nouns.
- Access stuff on a faraway Mac using Back to My Mac.
Take care of loose ends:
- Update account details. See Manage Your Account.
- Smooth the transition from MobileMe. See Appendix A: Replace Lost MobileMe Features.
- Fix things that go wrong. See Troubleshoot iCloud Problems.
What’s New in Version 1.2
This version of the book takes into account numerous new software releases from Apple and makes other small updates. Major changes include:
- A new sidebar called Using Multiple iCloud Accounts that covers when and how you might use more than one iCloud account for data such as email, contacts, and calendars on a Mac or iOS device
- Several updates to the iCloud Downloads chapter to account for the fact that you can now re-download movies, too (with some restrictions)
- Coverage of the numerous new ways in which you can Delete Individual Photos from your Photo Stream
- A sidebar covering Journals in iPhoto for iOS
- Restoration of previously deleted material about using Back to My Mac with a Time Capsule or AirPort Disk, now that Apple has added iCloud support to those devices; see Back to My Mac (in particular Configure Your Devices and Get Back to Your Mac)
- Removal of GoDaddy from the list of suggested Web Hosting providers due to persistent bad behavior, and addition of MacMate
- Previews of upcoming iCloud features Apple has announced for OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion.
What Was New in Version 1.1
Version 1.1 of this book included the following changes:
- A note directing you to information about iCloud security and privacy policies.
- Discussion of the fact that contact sharing, a feature of MobileMe, is no longer supported in iCloud.
- A new note about exporting each calendar separately and a new tip regarding exporting data in addition to backing it up.
- Information about using iTunes Match on an Apple TV.
- Greatly expanded information on using iTunes Match.
- Troubleshooting section moved into its own chapter, later in the book, with additional tips.
- Two additional photo sharing services (Picasa Web Albums and ZangZing) covered as MobileMe Gallery alternatives.
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Update Plans
May 2, 2012 -- Now that we've released version 1.2 of this ebook (it covers changes to iCloud introduced by Apple in 2012 so far), we aren't planning another update until after MobileMe is shut down at the end of June and (ideally) not until (shortly) after Mountain Lion ships. I'll post more information here once our plans firm up.
—Tonya Engst
Keep Mac.com/Me.com Email Working after June 30 without iCloud
May 8, 2012 --
Several people have written to say they don't have a Mac or PC that's iCloud-compatible, and yet they rely on their mac.com (or me.com) email accounts. So what, they want to know, will happen to their email after June 30, when Apple shuts down MobileMe? I didn't have a good answer to this, but I recently learned that several days ago, Apple began sending out notices to people with MobileMe accounts who hadn't yet migrated to iCloud, telling them exactly what to do. In case you didn't get such a message, here's a quote from Apple's MobileMe Transition and iCloud page:
What if I just want to keep using my email on all my devices?
As of May 1, you can choose to keep using your mail after MobileMe ends, even on devices that don’t meet the iCloud system requirements. Just go to me.com/move and select the option to keep using your email after MobileMe ends. Once you have completed this short process, your mail will continue to work on devices that don’t meet the iCloud requirements after MobileMe ends on June 30th, 2012.
And, as it turns out, following these steps also migrates your MobileMe calendars to iCloud. You can read more details about the transition process in my article "Keeping Your MobileMe Email Address without iCloud".
So there you have it. If you haven't yet migrated from MobileMe to iCloud (or reinstated an expired mac.com email address) and don't plan to do so soon, follow those instructions before June 30 to ensure that you continue having access to your email account.
—Joe Kissell
Joe Speaks from the iCloud
October 21, 2011 --
When it comes to flying through the clouds, it helps to have good navigational aids. Watch, or listen, as Joe fires up his in-flight radar to show you the shape and direction of Apple's iCloud in an interview with Chuck Joiner via MacVoices and MacVoicesTV about Joe's latest book, Take Control of iCloud.
—Michael E. Cohen
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