Chapter 4: Expanding Your Horizons with iCloud
In This Chapter
Introducing iCloud
Setting iCloud preferences
Managing iCloud storage
If you ask the average Mac owner about what’s available on the Internet, you likely hear benefits such as e-mail, drop box storage, web surfing, and Google searches. What you may not hear is “instant syncing among all my Apple iOS devices.”
If you have an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch, you may have experienced what I like to call the “Synchronizing Blues” in the past: When you took a photo with your iPhone or created a new document with your iPad, your new additions just sat there (in their original location) until you had a chance to sync your device with your Mac. Ah, but with Apple’s iCloud functionality, your stuff gets automatically synchronized across the Internet!
In this chapter, I show you what’s really exciting about your Mac and that fancy Internet connection. With iCloud, you can automatically synchronize your stuff and manage online backups of all your contacts, calendars, mail, bookmarks, and documents!
So How Does iCloud Work, Anyway?
As I mention earlier, today’s Apple iOS devices can all display or play the same media: photos, music, books, TV shows, and such. Heck, some iOS devices (such as your iPhone and iPod touch) can even share applications that you install. Therefore, it makes sense to effortlessly share all your digital media across these devices, and that’s what iCloud is all about. Apple calls this synchronization “pushing.”
Here’s a look at how the pushing process works. Imagine that you just completed a Pages document on your iMac (an invitation for your son’s birthday party), but you’re at the office, and you need to get the document to your family so that they can edit and print it using your son’s iPad.
Before iCloud, you had to attach the document to an e-mail message, or upload it to some type of online storage like Microsoft’s SkyDrive, and then a family member had to download and save the document to the iPad before working with it. With iCloud, you simply save the document on your iMac, and OS X automatically pushes the document to the iPad! Your document appears on the iPad, ready to be opened, edited, and printed — and it appears on any other iOS 5 devices as well. Figure 4-1 gives you an idea of what’s happening in the background when one of your devices pushes data using iCloud.
Figure 4-1: iCloud works by pushing data between all your iOS devices.
iCloud isn’t limited to just digital media, though. Your Mac can also automatically synchronize your e-mail, Calendar calendars, and Contacts entries with other iOS 5 or later devices across the Internet, so staying in touch is much easier (no matter where you are, or which device you happen to be using at the moment).
Apple also throws in 5GB of free online storage that you can use for all sorts of things: not only digital media files but also documents that you’d like to save online for safekeeping. In fact, items you buy through the iTunes Store — music, video, and applications — do not count against your 5GB limit. (More on how you can expand that 5GB limit later in the chapter.)
Configuring iCloud
You control all the settings for iCloud from Mountain Lion’s iCloud pane in System Preferences (shown in Figure 4-2). Click the System Preferences icon on the Dock and then click the iCloud icon. At the sign-in prompt, enter your Apple ID and your password. System Preferences will then guide you through basic iCloud configuration with a number of questions.
Figure 4-2: The iCloud pane appears within System Preferences.
Most of the check boxes on the iCloud Preferences pane control whether a particular type of data is pushed among all your iOS devices — data like Contacts entries, Mail messages, and calendars in Calendar. However, you can enable three other unique features from this pane as well:
Photo Stream: Turning on Photo Stream allows your Mac to automatically receive photos from your iOS devices. Take a photo with your iPhone, for example, and that image is immediately pushed to your Mac, iPad, and iPod touch. On the Mac, however, Photo Stream goes one step further: The photos appear automatically within iPhoto or Aperture within a special album titled Photo Stream.
To turn on Photo Stream within iPhoto, choose iPhoto⇒Preferences, click the Photo Stream button, and then select all three check boxes. Photo Stream must also be turned on within the iCloud Preferences pane.
Back to My Mac: If you enable Back to My Mac, you can remotely control your Mac from another Mac computer (or vice versa) using Mountain Lion’s Screen Sharing feature. (Read about that in the preceding chapter.) You can also transfer files between the two computers. Back to My Mac works over both a broadband Internet connection and a local network. Available Mac computers show up in the Shared section of the Finder window sidebar. Note that you must manually turn on Screen Sharing within the System Preferences Sharing pane before you can remotely control another Mac.
Find My Mac: Talk about Buck Rogers! Imagine locating a lost or stolen Mac from your iPhone or iPad. Now think about this: With Find My Mac, you can even lock or completely wipe your Mac’s hard drive remotely, preventing unauthorized use and erasing your private data! After you access your Mac from another iOS device, you can play a sound, send a message to be displayed onscreen, remotely lock the machine, or remotely wipe the drive.
After you lock or wipe the drive, though, you can’t locate your Mac again.
Managing Your iCloud Storage
Naturally, Apple knows that you’re curious about how much space you’ve taken up within your own personal iCloud. To monitor your iCloud storage, click the Manage button at the bottom-right corner of the iCloud Preferences pane. From the sheet that appears — as shown in Figure 4-3 — you can see how much space you’re using for document and data storage.
Figure 4-3: Checking on your iCloud storage.
Click the data type in the left column, and iCloud displays the amount of storage space that’s being used for that data. For instance, in Figure 4-3, I’m checking the amount taken by my iPad and iPhone backups. (I set both my iPad and iPhone to back up wirelessly to my iCloud storage.) Other items that might appear in this sheet include Mail and selected iPad and iPhone apps that support iCloud.
And if you need more elbow room than 5GB, Apple is happy to provide 10, 20, or even 50GB of additional storage for an annual subscription fee of $20, $40, or $100 per year, respectively. Click the Manage button on the iCloud pane in System Preferences, and then click the Buy More Storage button.