The Cult of Mac Super Guide To Everything Apple Announced At WWDC 2011 [Feature]

iCloud

• Mail, Contacts, Calendar… Rewritten From The Ground Up: MobileMe’s three core apps are becoming free to everyone with an iOS device, and they’ve been rewritten from the ground up to work in the cloud, automatically pushing all updates to your devices.

• Documents Sync: iCloud will automatically sync your documents between apps, PC and Mac, thanks to document syncing. Create a document on a Mac desktop app and it’ll be available on your Mac as well. Document sync will debut with Pages, Keynote and Numbers, but will become available to all apps with iOS 5 and Lion’s dev APIs.

• Easily Download Any Purchased Item To Any Device: You can now see everything you’ve ever purchased on your iOS Device and re-download it easily. There’s no longer any confusion about what apps you’ve bought or what you can’t. The same is true with music and video, as well as iBooks. In addition, iBooks will now allow you to save your notes and bookmarks across devices, like Amazon’s Kindle Whispersync.

• Photo Stream: Your last thirty days of photos taken on your PC, Mac or iOS Device will now be stored in the iCloud, automatically, You can access the Photo Stream by punching a button in Camera or Photos on an iDevice. On the Mac, it’s built into iPhoto; on the PC, it’ll be in the Pictures folder. It’ll even be available on the Apple TV.

• Automatically Backup Your iOS Device: Once a day, iCloud will automatically back up your purchased music, apps, books, photos, device settings and app data, without ever once syncing to iTunes.

• iTunes Match: iTunes will automatically scan your library and match any track it finds with Apple’s 18 millions song library. Once your songs are found, they’ll be mirrored in the cloud for download (not streaming) to any other connected device, at 256kbps AAC. If your songs aren’t found, iTunes will upload the tracks automatically. It takes just minutes.

• Release, Price and Space: iCloud will debut in September along with iOS 5, with a dev preview coming today. It’ll be free with the purchase of any iOS devuce, and you’ll get 5GB of storage free, without counting apps, books, etc. iTunes Match and iTunes In The Cloud will be a separate service, and it’ll cost $29.99 per year for unlimited storage space.

Anything we missed or forgot? Let us know in the comments!

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