iConnected

Use AirPlay, iCloud, Apps, and More
to Bring Your Apple Devices Together

Dedication

To Mum and Dad.

Enjoy the first book I’ve written that you can actually use and understand … for the most part.

About the Author

Ben Harvell is a freelance writer based in Bournemouth, U.K., and a regular contributor to major technology magazines and websites including Macworld, MacFormat, and MacLife. Formerly the editor of iCreate Magazine, Ben has written several consumer technology books with a focus on Apple products such as Make Music with Your iPad, also published by Wiley. He blogs at www.benharvell.com, tweets at @benharvell, and provides a professional copywriting service for mobile app developers at www.pocket-copy.com.

Acknowledgments

This book has been sitting in my head since I first managed to wire up a network of speakers across my home and stream any audio source to every room. Fortunately, Apple’s development of AirPlay has allowed the introduction of a wireless version of that system along with a greatly reduced number of tripping accidents. The iCloud portion came much later, when Apple had finally shook off its less-than-impressive history of bungled online services and introduced a simple yet powerful system that really does keep all your devices in sync.

As always, I ran the idea by Aaron Black at Wiley, who was keen to see the possibilities afforded by AirPlay and iCloud and so allowed me to put it into writing. Thanks to him and all the Wiley staff for making writing these books a pleasure.

Special thanks also go to Galen Gruman and Carol Person who, undeterred by our last outing as a team for Make Music with Your iPad, showed the same superhuman levels of patience and professionalism to help get this book into your hands in a legible form.

Finally, to all the developers who not only write great apps but are also happy to answer stupid questions from a guy writing a book — thank you. There are too many of you to name individually but, if you received an e-mail from me in the last year, consider yourself on the list.

Introduction

A Brief History of Apple Online

So you want to know about iCloud and AirPlay. Good, you’ve come to the right place. I will, however, in my capacity as author and Apple aficionado, first need to take you on a short history of Apple’s online and streaming services before we reach the Promised Land that both products embody.

We’ve come a long way, baby

Yes, I appreciate that you probably want to know how to sync your e-mails or access iTunes purchases from your iPhone. I assure you, we’ll get there soon. I simply think it’s important that you get a little perspective on iCloud (and a brief mention of the birth of AirPlay) before breaking down their features and usage. If you’re really not in the mood for a history lesson, by all means skip to Chapter 1, but I’ll do my best to keep things brief while filling you in on the ups and downs of Apple’s adventures online. You see, as much as both iCloud and AirPlay look like polished tools these days, things weren’t always this way.

The eWorld Debacle

As the word “Internet” became more frequently used and understood by the public in 1994, a partnership between AOL and Apple saw the launch of eWorld. With its colorful graphics and mock town square layout (see Figure I-1), it was a unique route to the web for those struggling to make sense of all this talk of superhighways and megabits, featuring an e-mail client, news reader, and communities (filled with ePeople!). eWorld, without marketing or advertising in a particularly troubling financial period for Apple, was ultimately a failure and the town closed its gates on March 31, 1996. While AOL took up the mantle with its web service and seemingly relentless free trials on CD (you know, the things you used as coasters throughout the late 1990s), Apple still harbored dreams of an online service.

Figure I-1

The town square layout of the eWorld interface in 1994

New Beginnings with iTools

By the new millennium, the company had decided that a preceding “i” in a product name was far more trendy than an “e,” and it brought iTools (see Figure I-2) to the Mac in January 2000. iTools launched as a free product with four main selling points. First there was KidSafe, a website filter designed to alleviate fears that children would be instantly corrupted after typing three Ws into a web browser. Second, there was Mac.com, the beginning of the famed @mac.com e-mail address. iDisk offered a whopping 20MB of online storage accessed from the desktop, and then there was HomePage, a rudimentary website builder. At the launch of iTools, Steve Jobs, Apple’s then CEO, proclaimed “Mac users can now do things on the Internet that Wintel users can only dream of.” Later, Apple would update iTools to use WebDAV technology, allowing it to be used outside the Mac platform and developed an iTools application for Windows XP.

Figure I-2

iTools offered new features such as the @mac.com e-mail address

The Year of .Mac

It’s fair to say that the lure of Apple’s iTools and its replacement, .Mac, was chiefly the cachet of an @mac.com e-mail address, more advanced features were in the pipeline, however, as the service began to take the shape of the tools we know today. As Apple’s fortunes began to turn in the early 2000s, with consumers looking for an alternative to Windows and the idea of being a Mac user becoming cool again, iTools was renamed .Mac and several new features were introduced, including backup and a virus scanner provided by McAfee. In late 2002, over one hundred thousand users had subscribed to .Mac at the lofty cost of $99.99 per year with a free transition period for iTools users and a discounted rate. Additional features were added during the six-year run of .Mac, including an online photo and video sharing tool, up to 30GB storage (at additional cost), and enhanced e-mail service. During this period, in June 2004, Apple also announced the new AirPort Express base station featuring a protocol called AirTunes for streaming audio across a network. This would, of course, eventually become AirPlay. But now back to the online stuff. …

It’s Not You, It’s MobileMe

With the humble, flawed beginnings of eWorld firmly in the past, Apple confidently took its online services to the next level in 2008, launching MobileMe (see Figure I-3) as a replacement to .Mac alongside the new iPhone 3G. Not only were several .Mac features dropped (including iCards, .Mac slides, and .Mac Groups) but the MobileMe service simply didn’t perform as advertised, leading to terrible reviews and moaning users. Syncing was a mess, the online platforms buggy, and some users couldn’t even access e-mail. The curse of eWorld had returned.

With so many issues plaguing users of MobileMe, Apple offered refunds and even an extension on the original extension of the free MobileMe trial, providing some users with more than three free months of MobileMe use.

Figure I-3

The colorful form of Apple’s unmitigated online disaster, MobileMe

And Then There Was iCloud

After the surprising failure that was MobileMe, Apple needed new direction and focus for its online service. So it introduced iCloud in June 2011 with the most important new feature versus the beleaguered MobileMe: It was available for free. New users and existing subscribers of the soon-to-be-discontinued MobileMe were welcomed to the new service, which was more geared to syncing and backup for Macs and iOS devices as well as offering the @me.com e-mail address. Which leaves us at a convenient point to begin this book. You might have an iCloud account already, or you may have been scared away by MobileMe and are now tentatively peering at iCloud and its offerings before making the jump. Trust me, things are better. Let’s get you up and running with iCloud.

Notes on This Book

Throughout this book, you’ll spot several items aimed to help you understand the topics covered or provide additional information.

The first you’ll come across are some odd looking boxes that look a little bit like barcodes. These are in fact QR codes, which you can scan with the camera on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch using a QR code reader app to access App Store and iTunes Store links. You can download a QR reader from the App Store to your device (many are free), and I recommend installing one before you continue reading.

Second, there are sidebars toward the end of several chapters called “A Day in the Life.” These sidebars offer a rundown of all the topics and processes in a chapter condensed into fictional real-world activities. They show you how the features and techniques described in a chapter will benefit you on an average day as well as provide inspiration on how you might better use iCloud, AirPlay, and Apple’s other connected technologies on a day-to-day basis.

There are several special keys for actions you take on a computer.

Apple (): Opens the Apple menu (at the far left of the menu bar).

Command (): Used for most commands’ shortcuts.

Windows (): Used for several commands in Windows 8.

I use the + symbol in keyboard shortcuts to indicate keys that should be pressed simultaneously, so Command+A means to press and hold Command and then press A before releasing both keys.

I also use > to indicate the separator for a menu sequence, so “Edit > Copy” means to choose Copy from the Edit menu.

Chapter 1

iCloud Explained

So what exactly is iCloud? And how do you get it if you don’t already have it? I tend to test out consumer products and services via my mom. Yes, seriously. A prime example of this technique was when she asked me whether she needed to sign up to this “iCloud thingy” she had received an e-mail about. As she’s a Mac, iPhone, and iPad user, I told her that it would make sense to sign up to iCloud and ran her through the benefits of syncing all her contacts and being able to access her calendar on all her devices. It wasn’t until I came to the fact that she would also receive an @me.com e-mail address that she informed me she already had one. She was already using iCloud but didn’t realize it.

I’m sure the same is true for many Mac or iOS users, primarily because iCloud is designed to get out of your way and work in the background with little or no upkeep required. An iCloud account can be created on a Mac, a Windows PC, or on an iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch and it be can surprisingly easy to forget the process and assume that you aren’t an iCloud user and that your products “just work” the way that Apple intended. That’s what Apple wants and, contrary to my opinion, shouldn’t be meddled with for you to achieve the ultimate experience.

That’s not strictly the case, however. Truly understanding iCloud rather than blindly letting it “work” is the route to true harmony when using Apple’s suite of online services. For example, what happens if, through an accidental click here or there, all your contacts disappear or are pulled from the wrong source? Suddenly, all your devices have the wrong phone numbers (or none at all) with iCloud blissfully unaware, assuming it’s still doing a great job. Similarly, not everyone knows exactly what parts of his or her operating system is controlled by iCloud and what isn’t. Is iCloud, for example, related to your iTunes account? Can you access your e-mail without it? What about photos? Knowing how iCloud works and how to adjust its settings are therefore important.

Why Do You Need iCloud?

The best way to understand iCloud is to think of it as an invisible cable that runs among all your devices connected to your iCloud account. Every device you own that connects to your iCloud account has its own “cable” that also connects to a server somewhere in Apple’s vast data center. Whenever you make a change to information synced via iCloud on any of these devices, that information is sent (along the invisible “cable”) direct to the iCloud server that houses your account. iCloud then checks your other devices to see if that change is present on them and, if not, pushes it down the invisible “cable” to all your devices so that everything remains in sync.

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!