Chapter 16

iCloud, the Cloud, and iTunes Match

In This Chapter

• Understanding how the cloud operates
• Keeping your digital life in sync
• Managing multiple Apple IDs
• Comprehending compatibility
• Implementing iTunes Match

I’ve tiptoed around the cloud issue throughout this book, mentioning it here and there as a means to an end. This chapter dives headfirst into the relatively new, unexplored, and unpublicized world of consumer cloud use. In years prior, cloud services were mostly reserved for enterprise users—companies where VPN (virtual private network) access was a requirement due to remote or traveling employees. But as the world becomes more mobile, there’s an obvious need to bring consumers into the fold. Without all the headaches involved, of course. Apple’s iCloud not only takes the place of MobileMe, but it adds an entirely new layer of sync capabilities. Beyond that, iTunes Match might just be the most galvanizing creation from Apple since the iPhone itself. It, along with Google Music across the way, has turned the music world on its ear, and aside from keeping your music safe from deletion and accessible wherever an Internet connection is available, it has also pushed the industry as a whole closer to the “rent, not own” model. Turns out, Apple isn’t the only one piping consumers into the cloud, so I also discuss the best cloud storage iPhone apps and how to best manage your iPhone files across hard drives you’ll never actually touch.

Wrapping Your Head Around the Cloud

What is the cloud, exactly? It’s ambiguous. It’s everything and nothing all at the same time. It’s always online, and it’s useful only when you are online. I’ve probably driven you even further from what the definition of the cloud really is, but as far as the iPhone is concerned, here’s what you need to know. The cloud, as it’s loosely explained, is an offsite storage location for any type of file; the trick is that the offsite locale is constantly connected to the Internet, able and willing to accept new files or upload existing ones on command.

In a sense, having access to a cloud storage device expands the amount of content to which a product has access, often exponentially. As I discussed in the opening chapter, you can’t buy an iPhone without more than 64GB of local capacity on board. Because there are no expansion slots, the only way to add more material to an iPhone is either to delete what you have to make room, or reach out to the cloud. Obviously, the latter is preferred, and Apple has spent years perfecting what is now known as iCloud. In fact, the company spent over half a billion dollars building a monolithic data center in the mountains of North Carolina simply to make possible what it has enabled with iCloud (setup screen seen in Figure 16-1) and iTunes Match.

Figure 16-1: iCloud selection screen; seen during the initial iPhone setup

Outside of extending the amount of accessible content to your iPhone, the cloud also serves another monumentally important purpose. It keeps your digital life in sync, across a litany of devices, without you ever having to intervene. Imagine this: you have contacts, e-mail accounts, photos, music, and videos that all matter to you. Some of it is created and uploaded from your iPhone; some of it is created on your work PC; and more is on your Mac at home. Just last year, it was an absolute nightmare attempting to keep content in sync across devices, let alone information. “Did I add this contact in my phone, but not my tablet? Does my PC need its address book updated, too?”

If you ensure that each computer or mobile device is linked into the cloud via the same username (or Apple ID, for the purposes of this book), the cloud can ensure that information uploaded from Device A gets shot down to Devices B, C, D, and E without ever needing your input. Suddenly, completely disconnected devices are at once connected, and information that was once siloed is now readily and immediately available across an entire portfolio of products. If you need another example still, envision an e-mail being sent from your iMac, and then needing to reference that material on your iPhone moments later. Simply visit the Sent folder in the Mail app, and it’s there. Now, to set things up so you’re maximizing the impact of the cloud on your digital life….

Setting Things Up

So, you’re sold on using iCloud to make your life easier. Congratulations. And if I didn’t already mention that it’s 100 percent free, now is probably the time to do it. I’ll start with explaining the process on the iPhone, which is where you’re apt to set up your contacts list, calendar, e-mail, and so on. Once you’ve completed that setup (described in detail in the first two chapters), you need only head to Settings iCloud. From here, you’ll be able to flip toggles to On for the items you want to keep synced across devices (shown in Figure 16-2). I’m having a tough time thinking of a reason why you’d prefer not to make any of these available elsewhere, aside from perhaps Notes, which forces you to create a separate @me.com e-mail address to enable it.

Figure 16-2: Don’t flip that Mail switch unless you’re ponying up for extra storage, or unless you rarely send messages.

iCloud is free for anyone who registers for an Apple ID, which you did when setting up your iPhone or punching in payment information within iTunes to download apps. You get 5GB at no cost, and Apple even excludes your purchased music, apps, books, and TV shows, as well as your Photo Stream, from counting against your free storage. If you have a bulging e-mail account or gobs of music that you didn’t purchase through iTunes, however, 5GB will almost certainly not be enough for you (bonus storage sizes are shown in Figure 16-3). In my example, I’ve disabled the syncing of Mail simply because my inbox alone tips the scales at 19GB, and I haven’t ponied up the extra dough to send it all to Apple yet. (For what it’s worth, it’s synced with Google’s servers.)

Figure 16-3: Extra storage, anyone? Pony up!

You’ll need to be in range of a Wi-Fi signal in order to initiate an iCloud sync. Why? You probably don’t want up to 5GB of your data flying over the Internet on a 3G connection. Even on so-called “unlimited” data plans grandfathered in from the earliest of iPhone sales, you’ll probably get a stern phone call if you push 5GB to the cloud over a cellular data network.

By default, your iPhone will back up to iCloud whenever it’s plugged in, locked, and connected to Wi-Fi. If you want to override that list of requirements, just surf to Settings iCloud Storage & Backup, and tap the Back Up Now icon at the bottom. I recommend that you have a strong, non-flaky connection when doing so, and if you’re on a relatively slow/limited connection, I suggest backing things up overnight so as not to consume the lion’s share of the upload capacity. There’s nothing worse than killing a friend’s upload rate when you’re crashing on his couch.

If you’re wondering why Music, Apps, and Books aren’t listed in the iCloud section of the Settings app, there’s a perfectly good explanation for those omissions. There’s a seldom-visited section of Settings called Store. Within it, you’ll find the missing toggle switches for the aforementioned trio. From here, you can enable any tracks, books, or apps purchased (or just downloaded, in the case of freebies) on your computer’s iTunes library to be automatically pushed to your iPhone.

Why separate ‘em out from the rest of the group? If you toggle these three as On, you’ll lock your Apple ID to this iPhone for 90 days, thwarting future efforts of pals to log in—even briefly—to your iPhone. In other words, think long and hard before automating those three. As beautiful as iCloud syncing is, it might be worth it to manually sync those three services in order to keep your iPhone available to any and all Apple ID logins.

If you do decide to enable them, I also recommend leaving the Use Cellular Data option flipped to Off. Data is expensive, and it’s a rare occasion when you’d absolutely need to suck down a song or book over the cloud and can’t wait for either Wi-Fi or a traditional system-to-iPhone sync. Of course, the best course of action is to leave it Off by default, and then trigger it On for occasions where you specifically want content purchased on another device with your Apple ID to appear instantly on your iPhone.

Workarounds Galore

As I alluded to earlier, Apple IDs can be tricky to manage. The most vital thing to keep constant when you’re looking to share music, app, and book downloads with family members is the Apple ID entered in the Store section of your Settings app. I recommend creating a universal family e-mail address that’s used for all of your purchases, and then sharing those login credentials with your kinfolk. Remember, however, that sharing is—in theory, at least—restricted to five iOS devices per Apple ID.

This might mean that you’ll be setting up a new Apple ID to share among family, but here’s what I recommend. If your personal ID is tied to years of purchases, make that the family ID. Then, use an alternate e-mail address of your own (a work one, perhaps) to use with your new personal services—things like FaceTime, Contacts, Calendar, and iMessage. This way, you aren’t splintering iTunes purchases between an old and new ID. That kind of fragmentation will undoubtedly introduce needless headaches into your sharing setup.

If you need even more control over what’s connected to which ID, you can do a number of things. For starters, you can head to the Mail Contacts Calendars pane within Settings and add iCloud accounts, toggling differing inclusions for each account. The rationale here is that one iCloud account—which syncs only Contacts and Calendars—could be shared with your children, whereas another iCloud account would be used strictly to sync your e-mail, which you don’t want anyone else reading.

An important point to mention here is one that often helps basic users get around the pesky 5GB iCloud limit when involving e-mail. It’s not uncommon for inboxes to exceed 20GB these days, but if you’re a Gmail user, you can use that service for e-mail and iCloud to back up everything else. Google keeps all of your e-mail messages in its cloud, enabling you to access them from practically any device or browser, so there’s no need for iCloud to waste space duplicating the effort.

Team Players

Any iOS device can run iCloud, so newer iPhones, iPads, and iPod touch units should be fine. But what about the computers that run alongside them? Apple had to make a few tough choices with iCloud—namely, that it wouldn’t support any OS X operating system besides of the latest. For those with OS X 10.7 (Lion) and OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion), iCloud is neatly tucked with the System Preferences, under Internet & Wireless. If you peek your mouse in there, you’ll be able to toggle the same expected list of programs to be synced to the cloud—Mail & Notes, Contacts, Calendars, Bookmarks (applies to Safari only), Photo Stream, Documents & Data, Back to my Mac, and Find my Mac. If enabled—for example—any contacts you add to your Mac’s Contacts app will automatically appear on any other iOS product (like your iPhone) and any Windows-based PC that’s also tied into the ecosystem.

Yes, I said Windows. Apple threw the millions upon millions of Windows users a bone years back with the unveiling of iTunes for Windows, and it’s extending the olive branch once more with iCloud. If you’re using Windows 7 or Vista with Service Pack 2, a 40MB download (entitled iCloud Control Panel for Windows) will bring iCloud support to your machine.

Once the add-in is installed, Windows users can cruise to the Windows Start menu and choose Control Panel Network and Internet iCloud. Similar to Lion, you’ll then be able to toggle the services you want synced with iCloud. For Mail, Contacts, and Calendars & Tasks, you need Outlook 2007 or 2010 installed; Safari 5.1.1 or Internet Explorer 8 or later is required for accessing bookmarks. To enable automatic downloads for your music, apps, and books, open iTunes and click Edit Preferences Store. Further details can be found at www.apple.com/icloud/setup/pc.html.

iCloud Web Apps

I’m pretty sure you’ll never leave home without your iPhone, Mac, or PC, but in the unlikely event of a catastrophic brain fart, there’s actually another way to access the information you’ve gathered in iCloud. Believe it or not, it’s… the Internet. Apple realized that not everyone would have access to their iOS device or a compatible machine at all times, and in turn, launched icloud.com. Surfing here in any modern web browser will prompt you to log in with your Apple ID and password, and from there, you can easily look at your e-mail, contacts, calendar, iWork (Pages, Numbers, and Keynote), and Find My iPhone, all shown in Figure 16-4.

Figure 16-4: The iCloud.com interface; clean, simple, useful.

Although it’s certainly convenient be able to access iCloud portals through the web, it’s the Find My iPhone functionality that’s truly mind-blowing. If you’ve enabled Find My iPhone on your iPhone (do it!), and you’ve logged into icloud.com with the same Apple ID as the one used on the iPhone, you’ll soon see its location emerge on a Google Map. Sure, it’s an excellent way to find a phone that accidently slid between your couch cushions, but it’s an even better way to find a highly coveted product that “mysteriously vanished” on the streets of Dodgyville. Once it’s located, you can send a message to it (I recommend a plea to call your home phone number) or make it play a sound (great for those who’ve simply misplaced it in the house). A look at the interface is in Figure 16-5.

Figure 16-5: Hope you never have to use this, but if you do, be thankful it exists.

If things get a bit more serious, you can remotely lock or remotely wipe your iPhone right from the web browser. Of course, you’ll need your iPhone to be connected to some form of the Internet in order to get the signal across, but it’s fairly unlikely that an iPhone thief would yank it and never once hop online to boast about their misdeeds on Facebook. (Or just hop online, period.) If any of your requests are successful, you’ll immediately receive an e-mail from Apple saying as much.

Google Drive

For a long while, Dropbox was the king of third-party cloud hosting and device syncing. Now, however, there’s a formidable opponent: Google. Google Drive has finally come to iOS in the form of an iPhone app that’s free on the App Store, and for avid Google Suite and Gmail users, there’s nothing better. This app taps into the Google Docs universe that you’re probably already familiar with, but also acts as a Dropbox-style “toss anything in it” cloud-hosting service. Thanks to Mac and Windows clients on the desktop side, you’re able to upload documents and files from your computer and then have them sync to the Drive app. You can also make entire files or folders available offline from within the app—this is highly useful for making confirmation documents available when you know you’ll be traveling overseas without a data connection.

I recommend Drive over Dropbox for a number of reasons. First, Drive gives you 5GB for free, and the expansion options are far cheaper than on Dropbox. Second, anything you create in Google Docs automatically syncs to Drive.

Implementing iTunes Match

Now that iCloud is squared away, it’s time to make a choice. For the music you’ve purchased in iTunes over the years, iCloud will automatically back it all up and enable it to be streamed on other iCloud-enabled products, all for free. But the compact disc has existed far longer than the iTunes ecosystem, and if you have many, many gigabytes of digitized music that you didn’t procure from iTunes, you’ll need iTunes Match to bring those into the fold. Apple describes the cloud-based service as one that brings “the benefits of iTunes in the Cloud” to music that you didn’t buy from iTunes.

Indeed, it’s built right into the iTunes app on your Mac and PC, and it will let you store your entire iTunes library in the cloud for $24.99 per year. I’ll break that down a bit further. If you enable iTunes Match, your computer will scan your iTunes library and “match” tracks that it understands with tracks already hosted on Apple’s servers. This serves a couple of purposes. For one, the version on Apple’s side is a high-quality 256Kbps AAC DRM-free music file; even if your version was ripped a decade ago at a pitiful bit rate, you’ll be able to stream a version with higher fidelity.

Secondly, this dramatically decreases the time it takes to upload your music gallery into the cloud. I think most folks—save those who relish the opportunity to listen only to the most obscure of tracks—will see well over 75 percent of their music library automatically matched. The remaining tracks will be uploaded to Apple, with your upload rates being the limiting factor. For vast, unsung libraries, it can take a week or more to get your entire library uploaded, but that’s probably at the extreme end of things. Thankfully, you don’t have to upload all of your tracks at once, and the upload manager will intelligently resume if the connection breaks.

Summary

Syncing is a necessary evil, even when it’s wireless, but Apple’s taking a huge step in the direction of effortlessness with the introduction of iCloud. Setting it up is crucial for those with multiple iOS devices, and even those with Macs and PCs can take advantage of keeping their e-mail, contacts, calendars, and documents in sync. Gone are the days of manually moving files, forgetting what is stored where, and never truly knowing which copy is the most recent. When you can’t access an iOS device, the icloud.com web interface suffices; plus, it offers an easy way to find your iPhone should it become lost.

Tackling Apple IDs can be daunting for families, but it’s worth putting in the effort to segment appropriately. Be careful about enabling iCloud downloads for apps, books, and music, though—enabling those will lock your Apple ID to your iPhone, preventing friends from logging in to your device, even if only temporarily. Backups apply only to your main Apple ID, so if you use the cloud across multiple devices, only those services that are using that ID will be backed up. Apple’s take on cloud services might be seamless to the end user, but it’s not without its fair share of setup complexities.

iTunes Match takes your music library and a whole slew of devices to an entirely new level. There’s no web interface (yet), but if you pay $24.99 per year, all of your tracks will be available to stream instantly from any iOS device or iTunes-equipped computer. Apple will even grant you access to high-resolution files, and because you can download DRM-free copies of them, this will allow you to replace poor-quality rips with superior alternatives.