Posts tagged with "iCloud"

Dispelling the Apple Services Myth

Apple is known for its quality hardware and software, but services are another story.

Cloud-based services are the future – there’s no denying that. And Apple historically has struggled with its cloud offerings. From MobileMe, to the early growing pains of iCloud, to the Apple Maps fiasco, the company gained a poor reputation in the area of services.

Only in the last two years has Apple publicly touted services as a core part of its business. Company press releases as recent as May 2015 ended with the following self-definition:

Apple designs Macs, the best personal computers in the world, along with OS X, iLife, iWork and professional software. Apple leads the digital music revolution with its iPods and iTunes online store. Apple has reinvented the mobile phone with its revolutionary iPhone and App Store, and is defining the future of mobile media and computing devices with iPad.

There’s a lot that feels outdated here, including the fact that both Mac and iPod are highlighted before the iPhone. But one major way this paragraph fails to describe the Apple of today is that the word ‘services’ is nowhere to be found.

Amid a variety of other changes, Apple’s current self-definition includes the following:

Apple’s four software platforms — iOS, macOS, watchOS and tvOS — provide seamless experiences across all Apple devices and empower people with breakthrough services including the App Store, Apple Music, Apple Pay and iCloud.

Services are a key component of modern Apple. The way the company defines itself, along with the numerous services shoutouts in quarterly earnings calls, prove that.

Despite Apple’s increased focus on services, the common narrative that the company “can’t do services” still hangs around – in online tech circles at least.

But is that narrative still true, or has it grown outdated?

I want to share how I use Apple services in my everyday life across three important contexts of life:

  • As I work,
  • On the go, and
  • Around the house.

My aim is not to perform an in-depth comparison of Apple’s cloud offerings and competing products. Though competitors and their features will come up occasionally, the focus here is on my experiences in everyday living – my experiences, not yours. I understand that just because something does or doesn’t work for me, the same isn’t necessarily true for you. The point of this piece is not to try proving anything; instead, I simply want to assess and share my current experiences with Apple’s services.

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Calendar Spam Reporting Added to iCloud.com→

Last month a rash of spam calendar invitations began showing up in iCloud users’ calendars from unknown senders. Benjamin Mayo at 9to5Mac reports that Apple has begun rolling out a ‘Report Junk’ link on iCloud.com to address the situation:

This lets users remove spammy invites from their calendar and reports the sender to Apple for further investigation.

At the moment the fix is available through iCloud.com only. Presumably the feature will be added to a future update to iOS, though it has not made an appearance in the iOS 10.2 betas to date.

If you receive a spam calendar invitation, log into iCloud.com, navigate to the spam invitation, open it, and look for the ‘Report Junk’ link. Clicking that link and confirming that the invitation is junk will remove the event from your calendar and report the sender to Apple. Calendar spam can be reported as junk whether or not you have accepted the invitation first, although it is best to avoid accepting spam invitations because it alerts the senders that the invitation was sent to an active iCloud account.

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CloudKit Gets Server API→

A notable addition to CloudKit announced by Apple today – an API for server-to-server requests:

In addition to providing a web interface for users to access the same data as your app, you can now easily read and write to the CloudKit public database from a server-side process or script with a server-to-server key.

Benjamin Mayo explains what this means in practice:

Until now, interaction with CloudKit has been limited to the APIs Apple provided in apps. Although this was useful, it lacked the options for more advanced use — most modern apps rely on servers to perform tasks whilst users are away. With the addition of the web API, developers can create many more types of applications using CloudKit as the backend. For instance, an RSS reader app can now add new feed items to the CloudKit stack from the server. Before, this action could only occur when a user opened a CloudKit-powered app, which was essentially impractical and meant developers had to use other tools.

Somewhat coincidentally, the announcement follows the news of Facebook shutting down Parse, the popular backend-as-a-service tool for developers. I’ve tried a few CloudKit apps over the past year that would have benefitted from a web counterpart checking for changes in the background – hopefully this change will enable more functionality for those types of apps. A feed reader built entirely off CloudKit with timely updates would be interesting.

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AgileCloudKit and 1Password 6 for Mac→

Nice (and free) update to 1Password for Mac released today:

It’s a new year and we’re starting things off on a strong note with a great new update to 1Password for Mac: Version 6.0! This latest version of everyone’s favorite password manager is looking better than ever, and we couldn’t have done it without you. Your awesome feature requests, suggestions, bug reports, and usage scenarios really helped us decide what to include in this release.

If you use multiple vaults, you may want to check out the new functionalities in 1Password 6.0 (release notes here). I don’t, but I may reconsider this to set up vaults for my family and MacStories.

Also of note: AgileBits built a framework to use CloudKit JS for the version of the app sold outside of the Mac App Store. Apps that aren’t available on the App Store can’t implement iCloud support natively, but AgileBits figured out a way to use CloudKit technologies for web apps in their Mac client:

From our customers’ point of view, iCloud Sync in the AgileBits Store version of 1Password will look a little bit different during the initial setup. CloudKit JS does not use the iCloud settings from OS X, so to authenticate with Apple, 1Password will prompt you to log in to your iCloud account by displaying the iCloud login page in your default web browser. Once you have logged in to your iCloud account, CloudKit web services sends an authentication token back to 1Password, which it then stores (securely, of course). This enables 1Password to sync with iCloud without having to reauthenticate each time. Since the iCloud login for CloudKit JS is completely separate from the iCloud settings in OS X System Preferences, you can even use a completely different iCloud account if you like!

I don’t know whether I should be impressed that AgileBits created this workaround or sad about Apple’s decision to restrict iCloud to the semi-abandoned Mac App Store (maybe a bit of both). AgileBits plans to make AgileCloudKit open source, too.

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Tweetbot Upgrades to CloudKit Sync→

The latest version of Tweetbot for iOS has upgraded its iCloud syncing engine to CloudKit, bringing faster performance for timeline, DM, and mute filter sync. From the release notes:

This update is all about sync. We’ve switched our syncing engine to use CloudKit which will provide you with faster, more consistent syncing between your iOS devices and Macs. It also sets up a foundation for some cool features we have planned for future releases. We know improved syncing doesn’t sound too exciting, but it will provide a better underlying experience.

From a user’s perspective, nothing’s changed – Tweetbot still uses iCloud and you don’t have to change anything in your preferences. However, Tweetbot is now using a better version of iCloud, with near-instant sync of changes between devices.

I’ve been running this version of Tweetbot with CloudKit sync for a few weeks, and it’s a very nice upgrade from the old iCloud sync. I’ve often left two devices running with Tweetbot in the foreground at the same time, and I’ve seen the timeline scroll on one device just a second after I stopped scrolling on the primary device. It’s impressive.

If you haven’t tried iCloud sync in Tweetbot in a while, go check it out again. Tweetbot 4.3 is available on the App Store (my review of Tweetbot 4.0 is here).

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Apple Rolls Out Updated iCloud Storage Pricing→

Apple:

If you purchased a monthly plan before September 16, 2015, your account was upgraded automatically. If you’re currently on an annual plan, you’ll continue to renew annually at that rate. If you select a new monthly plan, your annual plan won’t be available to you.

I missed this last night, but Apple has rolled out the updated iCloud pricing scheme they announced last week. My account was automatically upgraded to the 200GB/€2.99 plan, which I’m primarily using for storing photos and videos. I’m going to keep paying for iCloud storage, but I wish I could use it more.

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Recovering Deleted Files and Data from iCloud→

Dan Moren, writing for Six Colors on Apple’s new iCloud feature to restore deleted files and data:

A few weeks back, I noted that recovering lost files from iCloud required a trip to the web interface. At the time, the only data available for recovery were files stored in iCloud, but in the intervening weeks, Apple’s added new capabilities and reorganized the layout in the process.

Rather than Apple squirreling away data recovery options under “Advanced > Data & Security”, you now scroll down to an Advanced section, which contains direct links to file recovery and adds the option to restore both contacts and calendar/reminder data. Clicking any of those links will open the restore data dialog box with the correct tab pre-selected.

On both MacStories and Connected, I’ve often noted how the lack of visible file versions and ability to restore deleted files has pushed me away from iCloud to embrace the safety of Dropbox. I’m still going to need Dropbox for the foreseeable future (and there’s still no comparison with what iCloud is offering when it comes to recovering deleted files and viewing versions), but this is a start by Apple and I like how it applies to iCloud data as well – not just files. More of this, please.

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Photos for OS X Review

Editorial Preview

Let me begin this review with a disclaimer: I am not a photographer. In high school I took a class called Photo Imaging, which taught me how to use Photoshop and attempted to teach me how to take quality pictures. Now I know the Rule of Thirds, and can create images of middle schoolers defeating lions in battle, but it didn’t fix the problem that I simply don’t have a natural eye for photography, nor the patience to develop one.

What I do have, however, is a world-class camera that I carry in my pocket everywhere I go. While I might not be taking world-class photos with it, I do take pictures of my family, my friends, and my life. These pictures are not thoughtfully composed, they are not shot in Raw, and I do not spend hours meticulously editing them. Despite that, they are very dear to me.

As someone who’s written tens of thousands of words on automation, you might expect me to have some crazy photo management workflows in place, or at least to be using one or two or five different services devoted to the practice. In truth, I don’t use any photo management workflows or services. I’ve always been interested in them, and I’ve tried almost all of them, but they’ve all been too much of a hassle for me.

I take all of my pictures on my iPhone, and I take a lot of them. I have a habit of hitting the shutter button at least three or four times whenever I’m trying to capture something, because often at least one or two of them are blurry, or someone’s eyes are closed, etc. Eventually I get around to going through and deleting all but one of these groups of multiple pictures, but sometimes this isn’t until days or weeks later, and any third party photo management service I’ve used will have already uploaded the duplicates. The result is huge amounts of extra photos taking up often limited space and cluttering companion apps built to let me view my stored photos. Worse, making changes to the photos on my phone won’t sync to the backups, and vice versa.

Eventually I’ve grown tired of every third party service I’ve tried and reverted to just cramming everything into iPhoto (so that I at least had some sort of backup) and ignoring it. iPhoto is outdated, slow, and ugly. Any time I’ve wanted to look through my photos, I just go to my iPhone and look there. Any necessary edits are similarly completed on my phone, and the extra features that iPhoto may have offered (smart albums, faces, etc.) I’ve simply gone without.

Enter, Photos for OS X.

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Apple Releases OS X 10.10.3 with Photos App, New Emoji

Apple released version 10.10.3 of OS X Yosemite today, bringing a new Photos app that works with iCloud Photo Library from iOS 8, 300 new emoji, and a slew of bug fixes. We’re working on our Photos article – in the meantime, iMore has done an excellent job in covering iCloud Photo Library and the new app.

I use OS X twice a week at this point, so I only installed the public beta of 10.10.3 last week and took the Photos app for a quick spin. Since late last year, iCloud Photo Library has become my only photo management solution, where I’ve transferred about nine years of photos from all my devices. The new Photos app for Mac took a couple of minutes to download my library; after that, it showed the same collections and edits as my iPhone and iPad. The process was painless.

I’ve upgraded my iCloud account twice to put everything in iCloud Photo Library, and I couldn’t be happier. There have been many cautionary tales about Apple’s cloud services and photo management apps, but I think they nailed it this time. I’m happy with iCloud Photo Library because it’s seamlessly integrated with my iPhone’s camera and photos – I don’t have to manually upload anything, and I don’t have to think about managing photos. This is quite the departure from what I used to do, and I like how I’m not wasting time with scripts anymore.

For this reason, I welcome Photos for OS X. Even if not for me, I like knowing that my photos – the same photos I keep on other devices – will show up on my Mac as well.