I see clouds everywhere

iCloud is coming Monday. At least we think it is. The logo at the entry at Moscone Center clearly showing a cloud, a Lion and a big #5. In Chinese culture number five (五) means the Emperor of China, and the Tiananmen gate, door to the Forbidden City has Five arches. By an extraordinary coincidence it is today the anniversary of the Tiananmen crackdown.

But what is iCloud really? From what everyone says on Internet, it will allow people to stream music from the cloud. Another buzz word we will hear at nauseam in the next few week. All journalists will talk about that all the time and ask each other "are you on the Cloud?"

OK but what is "The cloud"? It is basically storage outside of your computer. It has been around for years MySpace, Google Apps, Google docs, Google Bookmarks are clouds.

Clouds are nebulous entities which stores and keeps your files, somewhere, in the clouds, instead of carrying them on removable drive or flash drives. This means that you can access your files, and information from anywhere in the world, provided you have an Internet access.

Imagine you loose your iPhone in Paris (they like iPhones over there), you go to Apple, with"Find my iPhone" you block your phone and/or brick it, you get a new iPhone and from the cloud reload all your contacts, calendar, music etc... In an hour or so, you are back on your merry way to the Louvres. The Impressionists are at Musée d'Orsay BTW.

You want to exchange files with colleagues or friends, easy. You upload to the public part of your cloud location and pass the link by SMS or Email and that's it.

Here some interesting pictures of iCloud. No this is not Apple, it is just another cloud in iTunes App Store.

For more clouds go there.

 

Watch Out Steve! iCloud is crashing on my iPad!

Steve Jobs will come out of retirement for WWDC 2011 and deliver the keynote himself which is quite extraordinary and confirms that something big will be announced! 

Buzz word says he is supposed to announce iCloud, IOS5 and MACOS Lion but this is not very exciting. Unless MacOS has 3D, virtual games devices and iCloud replaces MobileMe and becomes free for all iPad users...

You may not know but iCloud alias CloudMe, is the new MobileMe. Apple bought iCloud from Xcerion, a service company based in Sweeden -Linkoping for $4M. You can get a free account here.

What I don't understand now is that iCloud says that Safari is not supported when I login. Can you believe that? An Apple site that does not fully support Safari? Weird (See left of login button)

I hope Steve Job's demo of iCloud on his iPad works! Here it doesn't!  See what I get when I try to login to my CloudMe account on my iPad. I put the developer debug on and as you can see below iCloud is asking for Java. How many days to WWDC 2011 ? 

Note:  @twisted_weasel  reminded me that this is NOT the Apple site but of a company called ... XCerion. I perfectly know that! The post above is just to point that at -72H iCloud is still in Sweden which I find abnormal and risky.


Let see, Apple took control of iCloud.com and iCloud.org June 1st as proven by NETSOL whois records. An IP trace of iCloud.com says it is still in Sweeden (traceroute to icloud.com IP=83.140.241.12). I find unwise for Apple to keep the Xcerion version of the web still opened. They should have switched to their Cupertino servers. 


We all know Apple, they will pull the drapes just when Steve Jobs enters the stage, only problem is that DNS propagation takes an average of 24H to propagate all over the world. We just hope that the Clouds will dissipate next Monday. 

MRIs prove that Apple is a new religion

BBC Superbrands' show has now demonstrated using MRIs that Apple devotees brain will have a religious experience when watching a new Apple product. As if this was not enough ye Bishop of Buckingham - who reads his Bible on an iPad, sees huge similarities between Apple and a religion. Those who hate Apple should then be called The Null-A (as in Van Vogt)

News from the A religion:

Persistent rumors claim that next IOS will integrate interactive 3D. There is a free app on the store called I3D from University Joseph Fourier Grenoble in France, yes like the series, but Apple has a dozen patents on 3D and augmented reality devices.

Another under the radar feature that could announced is a revolutionary "Virtual Device Interface" API where developers could create a virtual device on screen with all sorts of buttons and behaviors like ... gaming consoles for example.

News from China about Apple buying hundreds new glass cutting machines for manufacturers of iPhones and iPad there. The new front glass could be curved which will be good to eliminate reflections. Only problem is that applying the film sandwitch polarizers etc found in front of LCDs will be very tricky.

Strangely enough Apple is inviting foreign journalists to WWDC June 6, because they will announce something "Big". 

Big?  Sure. A Lion is bigger than a Leopard.

..._._

For those who are too young, or Science Fiction analphabets
The World of Null-A - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia