Feet on the ground, head in the iCloud

iCloud is Apple's latest attempt at cloud computing, and this time they got it right. 

iCloud is now like several products wrapped into one. To take full advantage of it, you should turn on all the iCloud stuff in iOS. To do that go to Settings: iCloud. There you should turn on Mail, Contacts, Calendars, Reminders, Safari (very important), Notes, Passbook, Keychain, Photos, Documents and Data, and MOST IMPORTANT- Find My iPhone. 

I'll just mention a couple of things here, as some are pretty obvious.

If you use iCloud with Safari, it will sync all your bookmarks automatically between all your devices. Add a bookmark on your iPad, it shows up on your desktop and your iPhone. Fantastic. But even better, you can access any open tab from any device on any other device! Just go to the iCloud icon and it has a list of all open tabs. Very nice.

Photos is important because you get all the pics you take with your iPhone or iPad automatically aded to iCloud. And you can create shared albums in the cloud which can be viewed by others.

Documents and Data allows you to keep your Pages, Keynote, and Numbers docs in iCloud rather than on your desktop. I've got all my assignments from my entire Master's program at Wilkes in iCloud. I can start a doc at work on my Macbook, come home and open on my iMac, or even on my iPad. Docs and Data also allows other iOS apps to use iCloud to store data. I pay an extra $25 a year to go from the free 5GB storage to 25GB, so I don't have to worry about limits.

So how do you access iCloud? Go to iCloud.com. Use your Apple ID and password to login. There you can access your Mail (assuming you use the Mail app on either OS or iOS), Contacts, Calendar, Notes, and Reminders. You can also access all your Pages, Keynote, and Numbers documents there. And, perhaps most important, you can use iCloud.com to find a lost or stolen OS or iOS device. It can find and track any device you have "Find My iPhone" turned on on. 

iCloud is free, unless you want to add the extra storage. All you need is your free Apple ID, and it works best on a Mac running OS 10.9 and iOS 7.