Apple’s free iCloud service—formerly MobileMe, formerly .Mac, formerly iTools—offers a long list of very useful features. You don’t have to sign up, but you owe it to yourself to know what’s available; you sacrifice a lot of convenience if you don’t.
So what is iCloud? Mainly, it’s these things:
A synchronizing service. It keeps your calendar, address book, documents, reminders, notes, and photos updated and identical on all your gadgets: Mac, PC, iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch.
An online locker. Anything you buy from Apple—music, TV shows, ebooks, and apps—is stored online, for easy access at any time. For example, whenever you buy a song or a TV show from the online iTunes store, it appears automatically on all your i-gadgets and computers. Your photos are stored online, too.
Back to My Mac. This option to grab files from one of your other Macs across the Internet isn’t new, but it survives in iCloud. See Screen sharing with Back to My Mac.
Find My iPhone—and Mac. Find My iPhone is one of iCloud’s greatest features. It pinpoints the current location of your iPhone or iPad on a map. In other words, it’s great for helping you find your i-gadget if it’s been stolen or lost.
You can also make your lost gadget start making a loud pinging sound for a couple of minutes by remote control—even if it was set to Vibrate mode. That’s brilliantly effective when your phone has slipped under the couch cushions. In dire situations, you can even erase the phone by remote control, preventing sensitive information from falling into the wrong hands.
This feature can find your Mac, too. That might seem like a silly idea; how often do you misplace your iMac? But remember that 75 percent of all computers Apple sells are laptops.
Automatic Backup. iCloud can back up your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch—completely, automatically, and wirelessly (over WiFi, not over cellular connections). It’s a quick backup, since iCloud backs up only the changed data.
If you ever want to set up a new i-gadget, or if you want to restore everything to an existing one, life is sweet. Once you’re in a WiFi hotspot, all you have to do is re-enter your Apple ID and password in the setup assistant that appears when you turn the thing on. Magically, your gadget is refilled with everything that used to be on it.
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Well, almost everything. You get back everything you’ve bought from Apple (music, apps, books); photos and videos in your Camera Roll; settings, including the layout of your Home screen; text messages; and ringtones. Your mail and anything that came to the gadget from your computer (like music from iTunes and photos from iPhoto) have to be reloaded.
Much of this is based on the central Web site www.icloud.com (Figure 10-10).
Tip
You can get iCloud on your Windows PC, too, and enjoy all of its features there—including syncing to Microsoft Outlook. Just install the free iCloud control panel for Windows, which is available at www.apple.com/icloud/setup/pc.html.
Figure 10-10. Top: Here’s the iCloud home screen, showing the major online features of this service. All of this stuff, of course, is an online mirror of what’s on your Mac. Bottom: Once you’re in one of the modules—Mail, Calendar, Notes, or whatever—you can switch among iCloud features using the 
that always appears in the upper-left corner.
Your iCloud adventure begins in System Preferences; click the iCloud icon. Enter your Apple ID and password (DVD Player). Click Sign In.
Now the preference pane invites you to turn on two of the biggest iCloud features:
Use iCloud for contacts, calendars, reminders, notes, and Web bookmarks. It’s hard to imagine that you’d turn off this option—it’s the single most important iCloud feature—but this is the on/off switch if you’re some kind of heretic.
Use Find My Mac. This is the “Find my lost laptop on a map” feature described on Find My Mac, Find My iPhone. Click Next and then confirm that you really want to use Find My Mac.
At this point, you may be warned that to use iCloud password syncing, your Mac account needs a password, and you’re given the chance to make one up.
At last you arrive at the screen you’ll see when you open the iCloud pane on System Preferences from now on (Figure 10-11).
For many people, this may be the killer app for iCloud right here: The icloud.com Web site, acting as the master control center, can keep multiple Macs, Windows PCs, and iPhones/iPads/iPod Touches synchronized. There’s both a huge convenience factor—all your stuff is always on all your gadgets—and a safety/backup factor, since you have duplicates everywhere.
It works by storing the master copies of your stuff—email, notes, contacts, calendars, Web bookmarks, and documents—on the Web. (Or “in the cloud,” as the product managers would say.)
Whenever your computers or i-gadgets are online, they connect to the mother ship and update themselves. Edit an address on your iPhone, and you’ll find the same change in Contacts (on your Mac) and Outlook (on your PC). Send an email reply from your PC at the office, and you’ll find it in your Sent Mail folder on the Mac at home. Add a Web bookmark anywhere and find it everywhere else. Edit a spreadsheet in Numbers on your iPad, and find the same numbers updated on your Mac.
Actually, there’s another place where you can work with your data: on the Web. At www.icloud.com, you can log in to find Web-based clones of Calendar, Contacts, Mail, Notes, Reminders, and iWork.
To set up syncing, open System Preferences→iCloud. Turn on the checkboxes of the stuff you want to be synchronized all the way around:
Mail. “Mail” refers to your actual email messages, plus your account settings and preferences from OS X’s Mail program.
Contacts. This is a big one. There’s nothing as exasperating as realizing that the address book you’re consulting on your home Mac is missing somebody you’re sure you entered—on your computer at work. This option keeps all your Macs’ contacts synchronized. Delete a phone number at work, and you’ll find it deleted on your Mac at home, too.
Calendars. Enter an appointment on your iPhone, and you’ll find the calendar updated everywhere else, like in the Mac’s Calendar program.
Reminders. Make a reminder for yourself on the Mac—using the built-in Reminders app—and have it remind you later on your phone. Or consult your to-do list from any computer. These tricks are thanks to the Reminders module at www.icloud.com.
Notes. These are the notes you enter in the Notes program. They sync across all your Apple gadgets—and, as with Reminders, they’re available for inspection online.
Safari. If a Web site is important enough to merit bookmarking while you’re using your laptop, why shouldn’t it also show up in the Bookmarks menu on your desktop Mac at home, in your iPhone, or on your PC at work? This option syncs your Safari Reading List, too, and also iCloud Tabs (whatever tabs and windows were most recently open on your other Apple gadgets and Macs).
iCloud Keychain. It’s been many years in arriving, but it’s awesome: Safari can memorize all those passwords you have to enter for Web sites—and even sync them to your phone, tablet, and other Macs. It can also memorize your credit cards and your Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn account information. Details are on Organizing Bookmarks in the Editor.
Documents and Data. Numbers, Pages, and Keynote are available for Mac, iPhone/iPod Touch, and iPad. Therefore, you can store their documents online, where they’re accessible from any of your Apple machines. You can also have your Preview, TextEdit, and Automator documents stored online; use the Options button here to specify which document types you want synced.
Back to My Mac. See Screen sharing with Back to My Mac for details.
To set up syncing, turn on the checkboxes for the items you want synced.
Note
You may notice that there are no checkboxes here for syncing stuff you buy from Apple, like books, movies, apps, and music. They’re not so much synced as they are stored for you online. You can download them at any time to any of your machines.
After the first sync with the first machine, you can turn on the checkboxes on the other computers and gadgets, too, in effect telling them to participate in the great data-sharing experiment.
Every time a new photo enters your life—when you take a picture with an i-gadget, for example, or import one onto your computer—it gets added to your Photo Stream. In other words, it appears automatically on all your other iCloud machines. Here’s where to find them:
iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch. Open your Photos app. There it is: a listing called My Photo Stream. It shows the most recent 1,000 photos you’ve taken with any of your other i-gadgets, or that you’ve imported to your computer from a scanner or a digital camera.
Now, Apple realizes that your i-gadget doesn’t have nearly as much storage available as your Mac; you can’t yet buy an iPad with 750 gigabytes of storage. That’s why, on your iPhone/iPad/iPod, your Photo Stream consists of just the last 1,000 photos. (There’s another limitation, too: The iCloud servers store your photos for 30 days. As long as your gadgets go online at least once a month, they’ll remain current with the Photo Stream.)
Once a photo arrives, you can save it to your Camera Roll, where it’s permanently saved. See Figure 10-12.
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Photo Stream is the one iCloud feature that doesn’t sync over the cellular airwaves. It sends photos around only when you’re in a WiFi hotspot or connected to a wired network.
Figure 10-12. Left: Why, look! It’s photos you imported onto your Mac at home. How’d they get here on the iPhone? iCloud! Middle: To rescue one of these photos from the 1,000-photo rule, open it. Then tap the
button. Right: Finally, tap Save to Camera Roll (bottom row, center). Now, even after that photo disappears from the Photo Stream, having been displaced by the 1,001st incoming photo, you’ll still have your permanent copy.On the Mac. In iPhoto, your Photo Stream photos appear in a new album called, of course, Photo Stream. (On a Windows PC, you’d get a Photo Stream folder in your Pictures folder.)
You don’t have to worry about that 30-day, 1,000-photo business. Once pictures appear here, they’re here until you delete them.
This, in its way, is one of the best features in all of iCloudland, because it means you don’t have to sync your iPhone over a USB cable to get your photos onto your computer. It all happens automatically, wirelessly over WiFi.
Apple TV. When you’re viewing your photos on an Apple TV, a new album appears there called Photo Stream. There they are, ready for showing on the big plasma.
Did you leave your iPhone somewhere? Did your laptop get stolen? Has that mischievous 5-year-old hidden your iPad again?
Now you can check into iCloud.com to see exactly where your Mac, iPhone, or iPad is. You can even make it beep loudly for 2 minutes, so you can figure out which couch cushion it’s under, or which jacket pocket you left it in. If the missing item is an iPad or an iPhone, you can make it beep even if the ringer switch is off, and even if the phone is asleep. You can also make a message pop up on the screen; if you actually left the thing in a taxi or on some restaurant table, you can use this feature to plead for its return. The bottom line: If you ever lose your Apple gear, you have a fighting chance at getting it back.
(That’s if it’s online, and if you turned on Find My Mac in the iCloud panel of System Preferences.)
If an ethical person finds your phone, you might get it back. If it’s a greedy person who says, “Hey, cool! A free iPhone!” then maybe you can bombard him with so many of these messages that he gives it back in exasperation.
If not, you can either lock the gadget with a password (yes, by remote control) or even avail yourself of one more amazing last-ditch feature: Remote Wipe.
That means erasing your data by remote control, from wherever you happen to be. The evil thief can do nothing but stare in amazement as the phone, tablet, or Mac suddenly erases itself, winding up completely empty.
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And by the way: The evil thief can’t erase your stolen phone or tablet himself, thanks to Apple’s ingenious Activation Lock feature. It prevents the phone or tablet from being erased without your Apple ID and password. Good luck with that, bad guy!
If you ever get the phone back, you can just sync it with iTunes, and presto! Your stuff is back on the phone—at least everything from your last sync.
To set up your Mac so you can find it remotely, open System Preferences→iCloud. Make sure Find My Mac is turned on. That’s all there is to it.
Later, if the worst should come to pass and you can’t find your Mac, go to any computer and call up www.icloud.com. Log in with your Apple name and password.
Click the 
icon at upper left; in the list of iCloud features, click Find My iPhone. If you’re asked for your password again, type it; Apple wants to make sure it’s really, really you who’s messing around with your account settings.
Immediately, the Web site updates to show you, on a map, the current location of your Macs (and iPhones, iPod Touches, and iPads); see Figure 10-13.
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If they’re not online, or if they’re turned all the way off, you won’t see their current locations. If they’re just asleep—even if your laptop’s lid is closed—you will.
Figure 10-13. The location process can take a couple of minutes. You can zoom into or out of the map, click Satellite to see an overhead photo of the area, or click Hybrid to see the photo with street names superimposed. The big green dot indicates that one of your Apple gadgets isn’t as lost as you thought.
If just knowing where the thing is isn’t enough to satisfy you, then click the little pushpin that represents your phone (or choose its name from the menu at top center), and try one of these three buttons:
Play Sound. When you click this button, a very loud sonar-like pinging sound instantly chimes on your Mac, wherever it is, no matter what its volume setting. Even if your laptop is closed and asleep, it will ring. The idea is to help you find it in whatever room of the house you left it in.
When it’s all over, Apple sends an email confirmation to your @me.com address.
Lock. What if you worry about the security of your Mac’s info, but you don’t want to erase it completely and just want to throw a low-level veil of casual protection over the thing? Easy: Lock it by remote control.
The Lock button lets you make up a four-digit passcode (which overrides the one you already had, if any). Without it, the sleazy crook can’t get into your Mac without erasing it.
You’re also offered the opportunity to type a message; it will appear on the Unlock screen, below the four boxes where you’re supposed to type in the four-digit code. You might type something like, “Thank you for finding my lost laptop! Please call me at 212-556-1000 for a delicious frosty reward.”
Erase. This is the last-ditch security option, for when your immediate concern isn’t so much the Mac as all the private stuff that’s on it. Click this button, confirm the dire warning box, and click Erase All Data. By remote control, you’ve just erased everything from your Mac, wherever it may be. (If it’s ever returned, you can restore it from your Time Machine backup.)
Once you’ve wiped the Mac, you can no longer find it or send messages to it using Find My Mac.
Apple offers an email address as part of each iCloud account. Of course, you already have an email account. So why bother? The first advantage is the simple address: [email protected]. (It may look like what you’ve got is YourName@icloud.com, but mail sent to [email protected] comes to exactly the same place. These addresses are aliases of each other.)
Second, me.com addresses are integrated into OS X’s Mail program, as you’ll see in the next chapter. And, finally, you can read your me.com email from any computer anywhere in the world, via the iCloud.com Web site, or on your iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad.
To make things even sweeter, your me.com mail is completely synced. Delete a message on one gadget, and you’ll find it in the Deleted Mail folder on another. Send a message from your iPad, and you’ll find it in the Sent Mail folder on your Mac. And so on.
Apple, as if you hadn’t noticed, has become a big seller of multimedia files. It has the biggest music store in the world. It has the biggest app store, for both i-gadgets and Macs. It sells an awful lot of TV shows and movies. Its ebook store, iBooks, is no Amazon.com, but it’s chugging along.
When you buy a song, movie, app, or book, you’ve always been allowed to copy it to all your other Apple equipment—no extra charge. But iCloud automates, or at least formalizes, that process. Once you buy something, it’s added to a tidy list of items that you can download to all your other machines.
Here’s how to grab them:
iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch. Open the App Store icon (for apps), the iBooks program (for books), or the iTunes Store app (for songs or TV shows; tap the category you want). Tap More. Tap Purchased. Tap Not on This iPhone.
There they are: all the items you’ve bought on your other machines using the same Apple ID. To download anything listed here onto this machine, tap the cloud-with-arrow button. Or tap an album name to see the list of songs on it so you can download just some of those songs.
You can save yourself all that tapping by opening Settings→iTunes & App Store and turning the Automatic Downloads switches to On (for Music, Apps, and Books). From now on, whenever you’re in WiFi, stuff you’ve bought on other Apple machines gets downloaded to this one automatically, in the background.
Mac. Open the App Store program (for apps) or the iTunes app (for songs, TV shows, books, and movies). Under the Purchased heading, there they are: all the digital goodies you’ve bought using this Apple ID, ready to open or re-download if necessary.