$ grep -r Tag: «icloud»

When I got the chance to play with the new iCloud features in OS X Lion, the only thing that left me puzzled was the feature called «Back to My Mac». Yesterday I finally figured out how it works, and today I gave it a proper try.

The whole thing works very simply, between two Macs. On both Macs you turn on «Back to My Mac» in iCloud preferences, and from then on they behave as if they’re on the same local network.

I tested it today by taking my MacBook to work and leaving the iMac switched on at home. Once the MacBook connected to wi-fi, it reached into iCloud, saw that my iMac was online, and showed it to me in Finder’s left sidebar under Shared.

From there it’s all just like the machines are on a LAN. You can connect to it and browse files. By default you connect as a guest.

If you log in, you get to see all the files. You can authenticate either with the user account on the other machine, or with the iCloud account.

That said, I couldn’t log in via the iCloud account. But I did manage with the local account on the Mac. Got access to my files. You can copy or upload a file, just like over LAN — only the speed limit depends on the providers on each end.

But the most important and valuable thing for me is the «Share Screen» button.

I can finally drop TeamViewer, which is rather flaky on macOS and where to connect you need all sorts of numbers/codes or logins/passwords. Plus the constant pop-ups telling you it’s only free for personal use, and the connections that constantly drop out claiming the free session has ended.

And the client is rather pleasant. You can take a screenshot of the remote screen. If the remote Mac has more than one display, you can either show both, or switch to whichever one you want. It’s probably the standard built-in client; I just last used it back on Lion and didn’t pay attention to the rest of its features. To me it all looks great. There’s no option to change the quality of the streamed picture, but I don’t need that — my connection is fast enough.

So TeamViewer will from now on only be used for emergency Windows cases. Finally there’s a simple, convenient way to connect to my home machine. Beautiful.

P.S. Maybe someone can tell me how to stop the wretched TeamViewer from launching at boot? Even after I quit it, it just starts up again, and I have to quit it the second or third time.

Well, the new macOS with iCloud support is out, and iCloud itself has come out of beta.

So, after installing the updates, immediately after the system reboots you’re prompted to sign in to iCloud with your Apple ID. After signing in, you’re asked to tick the services you want to use.

I decided not to tick Mail — I don’t really see the point. I already use a mail client on both my computers and my mobile devices. Mail is over IMAP, so it all syncs anyway. Contacts is a relatively useful thing. I personally don’t need it yet, but after turning it on, all the contacts from the address book on the phone showed up on both my Macs.

The most useful thing, in my view, is calendar sync. I really didn’t want to bother syncing through Google and keeping a calendar there, especially since the only Google service I use regularly is YouTube. It’s very nice that everything now works and syncs out of the box. For example, I added the dates of film premieres I want to watch. They appeared in the calendars on all my devices and Macs. There is one annoying detail though — I added these events on one of the Macs. After syncing, those events were duplicated on it. But that’s probably an early-days glitch and an Apple oversight. After adding a new event it appeared everywhere just once.

Documents are still unclear. The desktop iWork apps only offer to publish files to iWork.com, which is still in public beta.

The «Find My Mac» feature lets you later track on iCloud.com where it is. As I understand it, this is for the case when it gets stolen, or you left it somewhere and don’t remember where.

iCloud.com is now also open to everyone — styled in the spirit of iOS, offering 5 tools (or rather 4).

Mail should be a web interface similar to the standard Mail app. Contacts and Calendar look exactly like the standard Mac OS apps.

The Find My iPhone feature looks pretty entertaining — despite the name, it shows not only phones, but also Macs that have «Find My Mac» enabled.

You can send a message and a sound alert to the devices. It arrives instantly, and on top of that you get an email saying that such-and-such message was sent and delivered to the device. You can remotely lock the device or wipe it. For iPhone there’s even a toggle — when found, immediately email me. So the location is monitored somehow, without your involvement, it seems.

The iWork section currently contains only ads inviting you to install the iWork apps on your iOS devices. Apparently those already work with iCloud. None of the iWork apps are installed on my iOS devices — no need.

On an iOS device, in the iCloud settings you can turn on Photo Stream. From the moment you turn it on, all new photos start being uploaded to iCloud and become available on your other devices. Only new ones are uploaded — i.e. the ones taken after enabling the feature. Anything taken before — doesn’t go anywhere. Here’s how they look in iPhoto on the Mac:

You also need to enable Photo Stream in iPhoto. As soon as I took a photo on the iPhone (and opened the photos list), the photo started flowing into iCloud. It appeared in iPhoto automatically without any action from me.

The most puzzling feature for me so far is «Back to My Mac». Judging by the icon, it’s a way to connect to your Mac via remote desktop, but I haven’t found out how to actually do it. I really want to use this feature to connect to my home computer from work, since TeamViewer is getting on my nerves with its glitches and intrusive messages, opening its website and offering me a paid version.
Update: a description of how it works.

I didn’t enable Bookmarks in iCloud, since I barely use Safari. The bookmarks of the Opera I use are already synced through their built-in Opera Link service.

The cloud also stores backups of my iPhone, which have already eaten up almost half of the available free space. A useful thing if your computer suddenly dies. But somehow that doesn’t feel like a tragedy to me. The other syncs are also a kind of backup.

What I was looking forward to most was iTunes Match, but it won’t come for a while, and, alas, will only work in the US for now — like all the cloud music services, be it Amazon or Google. Sad — almost makes you want to write your own.

Such is this cloudy iCloud.