iCloud

iCloud Mail is currently experiencing service issues. The conflict has been impacting users for more than an hour and is currently ongoing according to Apple’s system status page. “Users may experience slower than normal response when using iCloud mail,” Apple’s description of the service disruption says.

It appears Apple’s App Store, iTunes Store, and iBooks Store also experienced down time with customers not being able to make purchases, but Apple’s system status page says that outage was resolved after just over an hour. The iCloud Mail issue, however, is ongoing. (Update: Resolved as expected.)

Is apple mail down for other people or just me?

— John Hodgman (@hodgman) July 24, 2014

Nope, it’s not just you, John Hodgman, but we do miss your ads.

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Apple’s release notes for OS X Yosemite Developer Preview 4 reveal that the company will be wiping CloudKit data tomorrow.

This data has to do with the new iCloud storage APIs in iOS 8 and Yosemite as well as with the upcoming iCloud Drive online storage feature. It’s best to safely store anything of importance before tomorrow’s wipe:

CloudKit Note: All public CloudKit databases are scheduled to be emptied on Tuesday, July 22nd.

Apple previously wiped CloudKit data ahead of iOS 8 beta 3 and OS X Yosemite Developer Preview 3. Thanks, Genady!

Update: Apple has emailed developers about the wipe, noting that iCloud Drive, Photos, and other iCloud-related products besides CloudKit storage will not be wiped:

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iOS 8 beta 4 brings a new app to the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch called Tips. The application, as the name implies, provides quick tips and tutorials about iOS features. The app will be updated on a regular basis with new ways to use iOS device features. Apple has also launched a Tips website (in beta) so these tutorials can be accessed from a Mac web browser. You can find a full gallery of the current implementation of Tips, below:

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Apple this week has greatly expanded the availability of its Apple ID two-step verification, bringing the feature from 11 countries to 59 countries. Two-step verification for Apple IDs uses either iOS’s Find my iPhone application or SMS to provide login verification in addition to a password. The feature first rolled out for both Apple ID and iCloud IDs in early 2013 and it expanded to a few more countries later that year. Here are all the countries that support two-step verification (both the original countries and the new ones):

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Last month Apple confirmed that it would soon beef up encryption for iCloud email following a report detailing security flaws in major email services. While Apple previously encrypted emails sent between its own iCloud customers, now the company has enabled encryption for emails in transit between iCloud and third-party services for me.com and mac.com email addresses. 

The change is documented on Google’s transparency website that shows the percentage of emails encrypted in transit for both inbound and outbound email exchanges (pictured below):
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Apple is seeking employees from its own retail stores who have shown an enthusiasm for photography to test the upcoming OS X Photos application and iCloud Photos feature. Apple, last week, reached out to retail employees offering such a “career experience,” and here is the message to retail staff as provided by multiple retail employees:

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This past week, Chinese State TV called the iPhone a “national security concern” because of its location tracking capabilities. The iPhone’s operating system utilizes location for several applications, including Maps and Weather. iOS 7 also introduced a new feature that utilizes a customer’s location in order to provide improved traffic and route information. Now, Apple has quickly responded via a concrete and comprehensive message on its website for China. The message is advertised on the homepage, and is a direct response to the allegations from China State TV.

Apple denies the claims by stating that “privacy is built into [its] products and services from the earliest stages of design. We work tirelessly to deliver the most secure hardware and software in the world.” Apple also explains that it uses industry leading encryption to protect location data, and says that all location data is stored solely on the iPhone, not on Apple’s servers.

Apple goes on to, once again, explain that it does not work with government agencies to spy on its customers: “Apple has never worked with any government agency from any country to create a backdoor in any of our products or services. We have also never allowed access to our servers. And we never will. It’s something we feel very strongly about.” Apple goes on to list specific work it does for individual services in order to protect customer privacy.

On Maps:

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Apple has made significant enhancements to its upcoming Health application for iOS 8 in the latest beta of the new iPhone operating system. Most notably, the Health application can now utilize the iPhone’s own M7 motion tracking hardware for data sourcing.

The Health app’s Steps counter tab can now report steps without connecting to any third party applications or hardware devices. Because this feature likely uses the M7 processor, an iPhone 5s is required to get the steps data directly from the device…

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iCloud Drive was first announced at WWDC. This feature is Apple’s new approach to iCloud file syncing, replacing Documents and Data. The new interface acts more like Dropbox, with one central folder containing all iCloud documents in one place. This gives more flexibility over the model used by iOS 7 and Mavericks, where iCloud documents are siloed within their own app’s containers.

At WWDC, Apple announced that iCloud Drive could be accessed from Mac, iOS devices or even PC’s (as shown by the iCloud Drive preview page). However, a new setup screen present in iOS 8 beta 3, released earlier today, shows that Apple is also planning to expose iCloud Drive on the web. Although people were surprised by native PC support, bringing iCloud Drive to the web enables even more flexibility, bridging any OS with a modern web browser.

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Apple has just informed developers that it will be wiping all CloudKit-based data stores on July 7th. This includes iCloud Photo Library, Mail Drop and iCloud Drive. Apple warned developers that this might happen with the release of the first iOS beta and it is not uncommon for wipes to happen several times during iOS and OS X beta cycles.

Dear Developer,

We will be performing a server-side data wipe on all CloudKit public and private databases for iOS 8 beta and OS X Yosemite Developer Preview users on July 7, 2014. The following iCloud features will be affected: iCloud Drive, iCloud Photo Library, and Mail Drop.

Photos and videos stored in iCloud Photo Library will remain on their original iOS 8 devices and will upload to iCloud Photo Library again automatically. iCloud Drive can be re-enabled from Set up Assistant after upgrade. If you choose to store your documents in iCloud Drive, your Documents & Data will automatically be copied to iCloud Drive. iCloud Drive will not update across earlier seeds or operating systems. Attachments sent through Mail Drop will expire and need to be resent after you upgrade.

If you have any questions, visit the Apple Developer Forums.

Best regards,
Apple Developer Technical Support

Affected files for Mail Drop and iCloud Drive will not transfer across automatically on the release of the next beta seed. Photos and videos will automatically restore, however, as they are not deleted from local storage. It is likely that new seeds of iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite will follow this data wipe, as new seeds of these operating systems are already due.

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It appears Apple has started rolling out support for two-factor authentication on its iCloud.com website. The feature initially rolled out to the Apple ID management website in the United States and then in several other countries soon after.

Under the new setup on iCloud.com, users can only access Find My iPhone without verifying their identities. Mail, Contacts, and other “apps” require you to enter a passcode that can be texted to any phone number or sent to the Find My iPhone app on properly configured devices.

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Apple has told 9to5Mac that that the company will be ceasing development of Aperture and iPhoto, offering Photos for OS X as a replacement, which was first shown at WWDC.

With the introduction of the new Photos app and iCloud Photo Library, enabling you to safely store all of your photos in iCloud and access them from anywhere, there will be no new development of Aperture. When Photos for OS X ships next year, users will be able to migrate their existing Aperture libraries to Photos for OS X.

Apple says libraries will be able to migrate across to the new application when the application ships. Apple is working with Adobe to offer a upgrade path to Lightroom. As noted by TechCrunch, Apple will offer a Yosemite compatibility update for Aperture, but otherwise development has ended.

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Apple updated the beta version of its Pages, Keynote, and Numbers for iCloud suite today with a few new features and improvements. Notably, each application will now remember the last document you opened and settings like which interface elements were enabled or disabled (such as alignment guides and the zoom setting).

The apps will also automatically suggest your most recently used nickname when editing shared documents, improved image masking, and keyboard shortcut hints in contextual menus. These changes—especially the ability to remember your document settings between launches—more closely mirrors the functionality of the desktop software.

You can try the updated web apps on the iCloud website. The full statement from Apple is below:

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Microsoft is making notable improvements to its storage offerings for its OneDrive cloud-based service. The company is announcing today that OneDrive storage at the free tier will be more than doubled, Office 365 storage will see a major increase, and that there will be storage price drops across the board. Here are the three main announcements in more detail:

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Two weeks following the 2014 Worldwide Developers Conference and the release of the first beta build of iOS 8 to developers, Apple has provided iOS 8 beta 2 to developers. The new release is available over-the-air in iOS 8’s Settings menu, and it’s available for supported iPhones, iPads, and iPod touches.

iOS 8 officially launches this fall and includes several new features for both consumers and developers alike. iOS Device users will experience a new Health app for integrating health and fitness data, improvements to Safari, enhanced Messages features, design tweaks in Mail, and significant changes to notifications, photo management, and the keyboard. Developers will now be able to create third-party keyboards, integrate the Touch ID fingerprint scanner into apps, and integrate third-party home automation products with iOS.

We’ll be updating this post (below) with new features in iOS 8 beta 2 as they are discovered, and you can share your findings with us via email at tips@9to5mac.com. 

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Following the publication of an NPR article detailing the security of major email services, Apple has informed the network that it is working on an update to its iCloud Mail service that encrypts emails in transit from other providers. As of right now, iCloud emails are solely encrypted in transit from one iCloud email account to another, but an email sent from iCloud to Gmail or Yahoo (as examples) or vice versa is not currently encrypted. This is what will change:

Apple encrypts e-mail from its customers to iCloud. However, Apple is one of the few global email providers based in the U.S. that is not encrypting any of its customers’ email in transit between providers. After we published, the company told us this would soon change. This affects users of me.com and mac.com email addresses.

The enhancement will come into effect “soon,” but Apple is not more specific than that on the timeframe. While the quote above oddly does not specify icloud.com addresses, that newer Apple email domain likely falls into the same category as me.com and mac.com. The lack of end-to-end iCloud Mail encryption with Gmail, for example, is shown on Google’s data protection transparency website:

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In iOS 8, Apple is making the process of logging into apps a much smoother experience by allowing native iOS apps to access usernames and passwords stored in Safari. The new feature, which works by letting iOS apps tap into Safari’s AutoFill & Passwords feature, will allow users to login to apps with a simple tap rather than having to type login info. Imagine your username and password are stored in Safari’s AutoFill for Facebook, for example. When launching the native Facebook iOS app, the feature will let users select from passwords stored in Safari to quickly login (as pictured above with Apple’s demo “Shiny” app).
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In the several months leading up to Apple’s 2014 Worldwide Developers Conference, we reported on several features on tap for iOS 8, the new iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch operating system, and OS X Yosemite. Many of the features we reported on were announced last week: improved messaging, revamped notifications, various user-interface enhancements, indoor mapping, iCloud improvements for end-users and developers, Shazam in Siri, Voice Memos improvements, the redesigned Mac interface, multi-resolution mode for Xcode app testing, and of course, health-tracking integration. But some of the reporting did not become official last week. Namely, the Healthbook name, various improvements to Apple’s controversial mapping software, and a split-screen iPad multitasking mode.

Let’s go through each feature one-by-one.

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