MISSING IN iCLOUD
page 1
CONTENTS
1. INTRODUCTION
2. WEBSITE HOSTING
3. FILE STORAGE & SHARING
4. GALLERY
Apple's online service, iCloud, is intended primarily as a method for
easily syncing data such as calendars, contacts, emails and pictures
between your Macs and your iOS devices. Though it was touted as a
partial replacement for the old MobileMe service, it is lacking a
number of facilities which were available there.
This article offer some advice on replacing those facilities
which
iCloud doesn't provide.
FACILITIES PROVIDED BY iCLOUD
Email
Existing @me.com
and @mac.com addresses
from MobileMe will continue to work and new @me.com addresses (not
@mac.com ones) can be created when you open an iCloud account. Lion or
above
will set mail up automatically: you will
need to set Mail up manually on earlier systems - details
here
for Snow Leopard and Leopard, and
here
for Tiger.
Contacts
iCloud provides contact syncing.
MobileMe synced contacts from Address Book to Mobileme and
then to other Macs or devices using Apple's proprietary Sync Services
but a different method is used for iCloud, which is dependent on
OSX Lion. If an iCloud account has been set up and syncing enabled,
pre-Lion Macs can access the contacts on the iCloud web page.
Calendar
CalDAV is used for iCloud
Calendar syncing, but officially it can only be set up on Lion or
above. Some
people have been able to set up calendar syncing on Snow Leopard by
using the method detailed
here
- this is an unsupported hack and may not be reliable, and may stop
working at some future point. Leopard and Tiger cannot sync iCal by any
method.
Bookmarks
Safari Bookmarks are synced
to iCloud and from there to other Macs and
devices, using iCloud's own method: pre-Lion Macs can not sync their
Bookmarks; and they do not appear on the iCloud website even for Lion
users.
Find My iPhone & Back To My Mac
These ex-MobileMe facilities continue
to be available in iCloud.
Photostream and PhotoJournal
PhotoStream - a new facility - syncs
photos taken on any Mac or device to all the others signed into the
same account. Photo Journal allow you to upload groups of photos from
iPhoto to online web pages hosted on iCloud, but only from iOS devices.
There are a couple of third-party solutions which may be of interest to
owners of pre-Lion Macs:
BusyCal
is an iCal-like calendar application with extra facilities: it can sync
with the iCloud Calendar while running on Leopard, Snow Leopard or
Lion. A single user licence (two machines allowed) is $49.99.
Soho Organizer
can sync Calendars and Contacts with iCloud on Leopard, Snow Leopard
and Lion. A single user licence (multiple machines allowed) is $99.99.
The following facilities which were in MobileMe are not part of
iCloud's facilities and cannot be replicated elsewhere: Syncing of Mail
Accounts, Mail Rules, Signatures & Smart Mailboxes between Macs
& iOS devices; Sharing your Address Book with other MobileMe
users; and
Secure
iChat connection between MobileMe users; syncing of Dashboard
Widgets, Dock
Items and Keychains between Macs.
The
next page will start examining
the options for the facilities not covered by iCloud.
©
Roger Wilmut. This site is not associated with Apple.