iCloud

Do you know what time it is? It is one hour before this iPhone event – and Apple is updating its Store. That means new toys obviously. You ready already?

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In case there was any question, we’ve heard directly from Apple PR that there won’t be a webcast of Apple’s iPhone launch event. Last Year’s September event was live streamed but for unspecified reasons, Apple has chosen to keep this one off the airwaves. They will provide a live closed feed to the UK for European journalists however.

We’ll still be covering the event as it unfolds so make sure to stop by at 10am PT, 1pm ET or your local varient.

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According to a posting on the Apple Developer boards this afternoon, Apple will be resetting iCloud Backup data on Thursday, September 22nd. We believe Apple is performing this reset for the release of iOS 5 GM, which will be released around the same time of the reset. iOS 5 GM will be the last release before iOS 5’s official debut in early October, like we previously reported. This reset doesn’t include data from mail, contacts, calendars, reminders, or bookmarks.

On Thursday, September 22, the iCloud Backup data will be reset. Backing up to iCloud or restoring from an iCloud backup will be unavailable from 9 AM PDT – 5 PM PDT. If you attempt a backup or restore during this time, you will receive an alert that the backup or restore was not successful. After this reset, you will be unable to restore from any backup created prior to September 22. A full backup will happen automatically the next time your device backs up to iCloud.

Along with iOS 5, we are hearing two new iPhones will be accompanying it, and will be announced in late September and available for purchase October 7th-ish. Check out last week’s post for all the details.

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Apple has seeded OS X Lion 10.7.2 build 11C55 to developers today, and it is the first OS X Lion 10.7.2 build to include iCloud for Mac built-in. Previously, developers had to download a separate iCloud for Mac package.

OS X Lion Software Update 10.7.2 is an update to OS X Lion 10.7 and includes support for iCloud beta. Please refer to the seed note for more details and installation instructions. (Mac Developer Program membership is required)

OS X Lion 10.7.2 includes the ability for users to easily enable iCloud Mail, Contacts, Calendar, and Find my Mac on their computers. The software release will most likely ship alongside iCloud sometime this fall. Apple’s iCloud service is seemingly almost ready to launch with both Apple and carriers (for the iOS 5 integration) already being trained on the matter.

Let us know if you find anything; tips@9to5mac.com. Thanks Nicholas!

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9to5Mac has learned that Apple’s iTunes chief Eddy Cue has been promoted to Senior Vice President of Internet Software and Services, reporting directly to Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple. Cue, 47, will also serve on Apple’s executive management team. The change has been communicated internally via Tim Cook’s email message to employees, enclosed below. Also, Apple’s PR beat Cue, whose LinkedIn profile still lists his old role, by updating his public bio page on the company’s site to reflect the change.

Interestingly, Cue is now responsible for Apple’s iAd division which has been struggling since its promising launch in the summer of 2010, culminating with the resignation of Apple’s former vice president of mobile advertising Andy Miller earlier this month. In fact, Eddy Cue is now in control of Apple’s entire cloud-based operation that encompass the iTunes Store, App Store, iBookstore and iCloud services, the CEO wrote in his email message. Here’s Cook’s email to troops:

Team, It is my pleasure to announce the promotion of Eddy Cue to Senior Vice President of Internet Software and Services. Eddy will report to me and will serve on Apple’s executive management team.

Eddy oversees Apple’s industry-leading content stores including the iTunes Store, the revolutionary App Store and the iBookstore, as well as iAd and Apple’s innovative iCloud services.

He is a 22-year Apple veteran and leads a large organization of amazing people. He played a major role in creating the Apple online store in 1998, the iTunes Music Store in 2003 and the App Store in 2008.

Apple is a company and culture unlike any other in the world and leaders like Eddy get that. Apple is in their blood. Eddy and the entire executive management team are dedicated to making the best products in the world that delight our customers and make our employees incredibly proud of what they do.

Please join me in congratulating Eddy on this significant and well-deserved promotion. I have worked with Eddy for many years and look forward to working with him even closer in the future.

Tim

Fast Company last year ranked Cue the second most creative person in their annual list of creatives. They wrote:

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Apple has just released iOS 5 beta 7 to developers as an over-the-air update. iOS 5 includes new features like Notification Center, Twitter integration, Newsstand, and iCloud support. The software update will become publicly available this fall, likely alongside the new iPhone lineup in early October. Apple has released iTunes 10.5 beta 7 and Xcode 4.2 beta 7 as well. Apple has also just released Safari 5.1.1 update 3. Let us know at tips@9to5mac.com anything you find!

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We’ve found that in the Wi-Fi sync settings there is now support for multiple Macs. Under each Mac you’ll find what categories your iOS devide will sync to. Thanks Christoph!

Additionally, the Nuance Text to speech is now available as a menu item (below)

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The following issues relate to using the 5.0 SDK to develop code.We’ve pasted the full change log for the new beta after the break:

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Apple’s latest Photo Stream beta has an interesting icon that seems to look like the rumored iPhone 5s with extended screen and elongated home button (we count 4 pixels by 2 pixels – close up below the fold and actual icon, right).  What do you think?  Coincidence?  (Thanks Steve and Olivier!)

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Update: 1 day off it appears. Time zone?

What we thought was a static file in iOS that correctly predicted the previous Saturday iOS 5 Beta 5 update turns out to be one that Apple can change remotely.  Yesterday, it changed from Wednesday August 17th to Thursday, August 18th. We can only assume that Apple can change this on a whim so the date appears to be a target date, which we know can change. As of this writing, the target is in a week.  We’ll keep you updated. (Thanks to iCloudil.com for notifying us of the change)
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Looks like we’re going to have to keep waiting for an Netflix-killer from Apple… Rumors were floating around last week that claimed Apple was on the verge of launching a new “iTunes Replay” service, which would allow users to re-download and/or stream TV shows and movies. Unfortunately, a new report from CNET claims Apple does not have the agreements in place to offer content from the big film studios via the cloud.

While we all know Apple is working on some type of on-demand service for iTunes content via iCloud, apparently sources have confirmed the company has failed to sign the majority of the six major film studios and “negotiations could drag on for months” before they eventually acquire cloud streaming rights.

There were also rumors that Apple could introduce a video subscription streaming service to rival Netflix and Amazon. However, the report confirms this was probably just speculation, most likely stemming from discussions Apple has had with studios regarding a video-on-demand service in the past.

Why is Apple having trouble signing the studios? Greg Sandoval from CNET claims HBO’s exclusive distribution rights with Warner Bros, 20th Century Fox, and Universal, as well as support for the new UltraViolet streaming service may be preventing Apple from landing deals with the big studios.

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As a part of Apple’s MobileMe-to-iCloud transition, Apple will be bringing expired MobileMe accounts back to life. We have gotten our hands on login information for a long-expired MobileMe account and have discovered that Apple has already migrated these accounts over to the free iCloud service (shown above). In order to setup these newly resurrected accounts you need to be running Apple’s upcoming iOS 5 and OS X Lion (with iCloud beta installed). Your old MobileMe username and password will now function as your iCloud Apple ID.

The reason being is that these new iCloud e-mail, calendar, and other accounts no longer work at me.com. That’s right, for the time being, users who have their old MobileMe accounts migrated over to the iCloud service can no longer access their email on the web. We got our expired test MobileMe account up and running as an iCloud account on a Mac running OS X Lion (with iCloud installed) and an iPhone running iOS 5. Mail, contacts, calendar, and the rest of the suite work perfectly with native apps, but not in Apple’s me.com web apps. Find my iPhone is the exception.

There has been a lot of talk lately over whether or not iCloud will support the MobileMe web apps, usher in their own redesigned web apps, or leave the web in the dark. Our discovery points to no web app compatibility, but that is likely because the iCloud web apps do not exist yet. The Loop and others say that iCloud web apps are, in fact, in development. We’ll likely see those when iCloud is ready to launch this fall. Thanks, Kristian!

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Chart courtesy of paidContent.org

With all three players having introduced their respective cloud music offerings, we can now pit them against each other. The above chart is from paidContent which opined that “Apple doesn’t always get it right the first time”. Author Amanda Natividad observed that in iTunes “syncing should be faster and easier” while “song quality may get a boost”. She obviously wasn’t paying attention to yesterday’s unveiling of iTunes Match, a new iTunes feature that works in conjunction with Apple’s upcoming online service dubbed iCloud. iTunes Match scans your music tracks (regardless of their sources), making matching songs instantly available to all computers and mobile devices without you having to spend weeks to upload gigabytes worth of music to servers. Jobs said yesterday:

With 18 million songs we’re most likely to have what you got.

Apple’s boss also noted that his company will automatically upgrade all matching songs to 256Kbps AAC. On the downside, you cannot stream songs via iCloud – yeah, you read that right. Instead, you are required to manually download iCloud songs that aren’t stored on your iOS device by tapping a tiny cloud icon next to each missing song in the iTunes app before you can actually listen to it in the iPod app. Great, what else should you know?

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If you’re a MobileMe subscriber, prepare for some inconveniences while Apple moves your stuff to its humongous North Carolina datacenter. Between yesterday and this fall, when iCloud becomes available to everyone with iOS 5, some services won’t be available and other may need your attention. Apple outlined what’s to be expected in both a support document and an unreleased guide we uncovered. We’ve spotted another support document, this one related to MobileMe email aliases. So, what’s the deal?

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Yesterday, Apple killed MobileMe and replaced it with the iCloud online services suite which will be available free with iOS 5 this Fall. Apple has published a nice Q&A explaining what the transition means to MobileMe subscribers and how the company plans to go about it. Additionally, a notice at www.me.com/upgrade says that “you’ll be able to upgrade your account to iCloud soon”. With that in mind, you may want to prep your migration ahead of the Apple-imposed June 30, 2012 cut-off time when the MobilMe service will no longer be available. Wondering how? Turns out there’s a leaked document for that!

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iTunes Tone Store has been outed on this slide from yesterday’s keynote.

In addition to the big ones, iOS 5 includes dozens of nice-to-haves that have been given little air time during Apple’s WWDC keynote talk yesterday, excluding passing mention on a group slide. So, what do you see in the above snap? Yeah, it’s Apple’s iOS software chief Scott Forstall zipping through the iOS 5 segment of the keynote. See the iTunes Tone Store mention on the slide? Given Apple already sells 99-cent ringtones on iTunes and they let us create our own 30-second snippets from iTunes purchases, we can’t help but wonder – why do we need yet another store? Plus, a Paal, Belgium-based reader creates a YouTube video as a comment to this article, found at the bottom.

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A Stevenote is in progress at San Francisco’s Moscone West where Apple’s boss and his top lieutenants are on stage, making headlines with a plethora of iOS 5, Lion and iCloud announcements. The keynote has kicked off Apple’s annual developer conference which runs through June 10.

“I get to unveil iCloud”, Jobs said as he announced Apple’s latest online services suite that will replace MobileMe as a go-to solution for all your cloud needs. He argued that the cloud – not your computer  – has now become the hub for your digital life. Keeping all your devices in sync makes us crazy, Jobs observed, adding “We’ve got a great solution to this problem… We’re going to demote the PC and the Mac to just be a device.”

The cloud sync works automatically between iOS devices, PCs and Macs, per Apple’s “It just works” mantra. Any changes in, say, the Calendar or Contacts apps get automatically pushed via the cloud to all of your iOS devices. This is true for any supported app, which includes the recently updated Pages and Keynote apps. Plus, the new Cloud Storage APIs let third-parties write apps that tie with this cloud storage.For instance, you can create a document in Pages for iPhone and it will automagically become available via the cloud on your iPad – they call that Documents in Cloud. Jobs said,

Documents in the Cloud really completes our iOS document storage story. A lot of us have been working for 10 years to get rid of the file system so the user doesn’t have to learn about it.

What else is cool?

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Image credit: Engadget

Our own Seth Weintraub is on hand at San Francisco’s Moscone West where Steve Jobs has taken the stage at 9am Pacific, ready to deliver a landmark presentation on the future of Apple’s operating system and cloud services. A press release issued last Tuesday has divided the agenda for the software-focused WWDC 2011 show between iOS 5, Mac OS X Lion and iCloud segments.

The statement also said “a team of Apple executives” would help Jobs deliver the keynote. We’re guessing Timothy Cook will join Apple’s CEO shortly to provide an update on business metrics and are keeping our fingers crossed for Scott Forstall and Phil Schiller to demo the new stuff in iOS 5 and Lion, respectively, with Jobs jumping in and out between segments…

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Douglas Bowman (via MR) had a peak into Moscone West and saw an iCloud icon.   Looks familiar, no? Oh yes, we detailed this just a few months ago:

A 9to5mac reader writes in telling us he/she’s found some interesting files in Lion.  These files are labeled “MobileDocumentsFolder.icns, Mobile Documents 32.png and SidebarMobileDocumentsFolder.icns” and show new types of icons for a Cloud file system.  Clearly, this would seem to be the successor to iDisk and is probably shows a more transparent interface between the desktop and the Cloud, perhaps a little more like Dropbox. We’re also thinking there is an iWork.com component as well since these are “documentsFolders”.

– here’s the new sidebar icon.

Update: In fact, it looks a lot like a mix of iDisk and iSync (which makes a lot of sense)

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With five days to go before WWDC, Apple now is the official registrant behind iCloud.com. It appears that there may just be some live iCloud demos in store (shocking, we know). Also, it explains why Apple had to go public about the iCloud.com – the domain registration would have went public beforehand anyhow

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The Ecconomic Times expands on the recent chatter about the iTunes Cloud (iCloud?)service we’ve been hearing about.  The news site confirms that Apple has locked up deals with 3/4 of the top labels (Universal is widely reported to be the holdout) and is set to reveal the new service at next month’s WWDC.

The Cupertino, California-based gadget-maker is expected to launch a new Web-hosted music service next month, according to multiple reports, after negotiating deals with at least three of the four major record labels.

WWDC isn’t traditionally a venue for iTunes related news but we’ll give Apple a pass…

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