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.

Look, up in the sky, it's a cloud!

Apple’s iCloud now includes the iWork suite of apps, Pages, Keynote, and Numbers. Though, not the first developer to develop web based apps, or even the first try for Apple, this contribution to online webware is significant. 

Like Google docs, Pages documents can now be created and edited in a web browser. Documents are saved to the cloud. The browser can be either Mac or Windows OS. But unlike Google docs, Pages documents can be edited in the Pages app on a Mac, as well as in a browser. And while they haven’t completed the transition to allow them to be edited in the Pages app on iOS (iPads and iPhones), a copy of a Pages document can be downloaded and open in those iOS apps.

Once iCloud is turned on, one uses one’s Apple ID to access documents. Backups are automatic, as is the saving of changes. Documents can be renamed and moved into folders for better organization. One great improvement to this beta version of these apps, is the ability to share them with collaborators. Documents can be shared via iCloud (via Message, Mail, Twitter, or Facebook), or through Mail, Message, iTunes, or any WebDav connection. The owner of a document can revoke sharing of the document at any time, or may make it “view only”.

I would recommend the use of Pages to students for a variety of reasons:

• Automatic backup of work, so work is never lost.
• Availability of iCloud via web browser makes it ideal for students who need to move around using different devices to access work.
• Cloud based storage means documents are always available, no more forgetting work at home or losing work. 
• Flexible documents easily allow the addition of graphics, tables, images, text boxes, and objects- all of which can be placed anywhere on the page (big difference from Google Docs).