iCloud A First Look
One of the biggest things announced at WWDC last Monday was iCloud. A revolutionary new (more so improved) service to keep all of your digital life in sync. Steve promised a way to have contacts, calendars, bookmarks, photos, and even music in sync. When I first heard of it I knew I had to test it, so I did. Turns out that I love it, there are a few flaws but those are outweighed greatly by all of the benefits that iCloud brings. So I have compiled some of the best new features of iCloud.
Setup: iCloud is much simpler than mobile me, one of the reasons for that would be setup. When you first start iOS 5 after restoring you are greeted with a welcome page to set up your iPhone. iCloud is turned on by default and you simply login with your Apple ID to start the account. A few other things are setup like find my iPhone and wifi but with that first login your Apple ID will be tied in with all of your Apple Developed apps (app store, iTunes etc.). From there all your iDevices are seamless.
Contacts, Calendars, and Mail: After setup your contacts and calendars currently synced to your iPhone will be automatically pushed to the cloud and then served to the rest of your devices activated with iCloud. When you add a new contact or event the update is nearly instant for the rest of your devices. Also with iCloud you get a new mail account that is made from your current email used to setup iCloud, it just changes the extension from yahoo or gmail to @me.com. You can then use that as your new address and you can back up mail from that address or any other address to your 5GB of storage on your cloud.
Photostream: One of the big features (and my personal favorite) of iCloud is keeping your most recent photos on the cloud. When you take a picture (with wifi) it is instantly uploaded to the cloud and then pushed to your iPad and MacBook. You would think this process would take a while but it is actually fairly fast. Although when you are outside on 3G and take a picture your iPhone waits until on a wifi network to upload the new pic. Once your photos are on the cloud you can go to Photostream from any of your iDevices and save them to a new or previous album, share them, or copy. One thing that you cannot do though is delete from the cloud. So for 30 days up to 1000 photos will be permanently on you phone, computer, or tablet. Overall though Photostream is a very convenient feature in that all of your photos will be on all of your devices at all times.
Music and Apps: A feature that is now available to all iOS users on 4.3.3 or 5 is previous purchases. In iTunes and the App Store there is a section of your previous purchases, every single one, even apps or songs that have been removed can be re-downloaded from the store. With every song or app you have purchased but don’t have on your device there will be a new cloud icon next to it which will allow you to re-download it. This is very convenient especially since the apps and songs are categorized into an All section and a Not On This Device section so you can see what you forgot to sync to your device or an app you may have forgot you had purchased. This feature takes the second guessing of “Did I buy that app?” and allows you to get that app again without having to pay.
Overall iCloud makes syncing a thing of the past, because you can even back up your entire iPhone or iPad to your 5GB of data on the cloud. Being able to have all of your content on all of your devices all the time is a great thing and makes managing your digital content very easy.
read moreFAQ: How To Fix iOS 5 Photo Sync Issues
Hey guys, now, as you know, iOS 5 has been around for a few days and I have been playing around with it since it came out on Monday. However, there was one thing that I could not do with my iPhone anymore, and that was sync photos correctly. It would sync about 100 out of the over 1,000 pictures I usually sync to my iPhone (and they wouldn’t be in the same album either) and it would give me a triangle in iTunes next to my iPhone.
Well, I figured out a way to fix the sync issues I was having. Turns out, as I believe is the case (not confirmed by Apple yet), but the photos database that iOS 2.0 -> 4.3.3 used is no longer compatible with iOS 5. So, I had to delete the database and allow iTunes 10.5 (beta) to create a new one, that was iOS 5 compatable.
All you have to do is go into Finder, click on “Pictures” and look for a file called “iPhoto Library”, then, right click (or put 2 fingers on the track pad) and click it, and choose “Show Package Contents”.
Now, look at the picture above for reference, and find a folder called “iPod Photo Cache” and delete it. Also, make sure to EMPTY YOUR TRASH!! If you don’t, then it won’t always work as Finder will sometimes still consider it as still being there.
Then, close iTunes and relaunch it.
Now, go to sync your photos onto your iOS 5 device, it should now work!
You should see it syncing your pictures! As for the triangle (forgot to do so in my screenshot that I took), after the sync is complete, click on it to get rid of it. If it disappears it means that everything is 100% synced up and ready to go!
There you go guys! Have fun!
read moreFix: iTunes was unable to load provider data from Sync Services. Reconnect or try again later
Are you getting the error iTunes was unable to load provider data from Sync Services. Reconnect or try again later? We have had reports of users experiencing this issue with the latest iOS 5 beta and the iTunes 10.5 beta. You may also be receiving this error on non beta software as well.
Since I have not personally seen this error this is no way for me to verify that these solutions fix the problem. In iOS 5 if you just hit OK and ignore the problem you can still Sync. Other people may have problems syncing on older versions of iOS.
This error seems to happen mostly in Windows 7 systems.In order to fix the problem you can try renaming the sqllite file in Windows/System32 or Windows/SysWOW64 to sqllite.dll.old. This will allow a new file to be written and the old file will get ignored.
Another possible fix would be (Win7 64 bit with Roaming profile):
1. Unplug iPhone
2. Rename theSyncServices folder found at C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\AppleComputer to SyncServices_Old
3. Reconnect iPhone
If you know of any other solutions please post them in the comments. You may also want to read Apple’s long support thread.
read more5 More New features of iOS 5
This review was submitted by our guest writer Brody White. If you would like to be a guest writer here check out the Guest Writer page. You can write about anything you want related to our website and we even provide you with promo codes to apps for you to review.
Here is a little bit more in depth look into iOS 5, of some of the features that were not discussed at Monday’s keynote or anywhere else for that mater.
The camera app. Along with being launched from the lock screen and using the volume up button for shutter the camera app has an interesting new way to view the camera roll. After you have taken a picture and want to preview it you used to have to press the small preview square in the bottom left but now you simply swipe your finger to the right and the photo you just took is displayed. From there you can continue to swipe through all your previously captured photos.
2. The iPad iPod app. To be truthful there actually is no iPod app any longer, it has been replaced with a newly named Music app and music note icon. When entering the app you get a more iTunes like feel with a wood grain outline. The play, previous, and next buttons are all larger and located at the top left. Next to them is a newly designed play bar displaying the progress of your playing music along with album artwork, shuffle and repeat buttons, and genius. There is now a search bar in the bottom right to search through artists, songs, playlist, or any of the sections. Another feature is a button that links to the store which opens the iTunes app. Now two of the more interesting features are that you can now delete music straight from the Music app which is a step towards cutting the cord from your Mac. Also when playing a song and viewing its album artwork you can simply swipe across the artwork and it skips to the next song.
3. Custom Vibrations. It is now possible to make your own vibration pattern for all of your contacts. Located in Settings>General>Accessibility you can turn on custom vibrations, then return to Settings and in Sounds scroll to vibration patterns where you can create custom vibration patterns for certain contacts that you can assign later with the Contacts app.
4. Multitasking on the iPad. Way back on a previous developer preview many of us were exposed to a new way to navigate the iPad. It was multitasking gestures. With the first release most of them could be glitchy, slow, and overall unreliable. But now with iOS 5 they have been redesigned to be fairly smooth and functional. One of the gestures pinching five fingers to return to the home screen has been improved in that when pinching slowly you notice the home screen now fades in from black and the app icons are already there during the animation while previously all you could see were the names of the apps. Another gesture that I use very frequently would be four finger swipe up to reveal the app switcher. This makes switching apps really fast and convenient and now with iOS 5 they fixed just a small thing that I noticed. When using four fingers to swipe up you can continually swipe up and down opening and closing the switcher as before it would either crash due to so much input or would just ignore it. Also you have the ability to swipe four fingers from right to left and it will move to the next open app in the switcher.
5. Notification Center. Ahh the biggest and best new feature of iOS. Everything about Notification center will forever change how we use our iPhones and iPads. It has also changed the settings for notifications as well, when going to these new settings there are now many more options. First you can choose how to arrange you widgets and notifications either manually or by time of arrival. By choosing manual you can have your weather widget at the top at all times or on bottom if you choose along with the location of all your notifications. When you enter the settings for an individual app you now have options for it appearing at all in the center, how many of it’s recent items you would like it to display, if you would like to view it in the lock screen, and the alert style wether it be the cool new banners or the old annoying pop-ups. But out of all these good things I have found one flaw, there are no widgets for the iPad. Why, I do not know, but for some reason iPad users will not get the same luxury of having weather and stocks in their notification center.
BREAKING: iOS 5 Beta 1 Tethered Jailbreak Released!
It looks like The iPhone Dev Team has just released (at 3:52a.m.) a iOS 5 beta 1 compatible version of redsn0w for the following devices:
* iPhone 4
* iPhone 3G S
*iPad (1st generation)
* iPod touch 4th gen
* iPod touch 3rd gen
Now, as I said before, this is a tethered jailbreak so if you need to reboot, you have to connect it to your Mac and run the reboot sequence within redsn0w.
Also, this is Mac only (for now)! MuscleNerd says that they will bring out a Windows version soon.
I, for one, am jailbreaking in order to merge my music & videos icons once more, it is VERY annoying having them be separate. Also, I want to dig into the OS and hopefully find some intriguing things…
Again, DO NOT use this for piracy reasons, we can not stress that enough.
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