I won’t be going to the iCloud anytime soon
Apple released OS X 10.7.2 this week and they’ve flipped the bit on the iCloud service making it available for everyone. This service replaces MobileMe which I’ve been a user of since it was called .Mac. I use it for an email account, some convenient webdav storage (that happens to be pretty slow) and for its syncing service. Well, that last bit just got a lot less useful.
iCloud won’t sync Keychain items or Email accounts between computers anymore. If you’re like me and have multiple machines, these features are really valuable and don’t have a viable replacement. Some users have started linking their Keychains files to a directory on Dropbox and using that as a cheap solution, but this doesn’t take merges into account. If you update your keychain on two computers at the same time, you’ll have to pick one or the other which means losing information.
MobileMe’s going to be active until June of 2012 which gives Apple plenty of time to create a solution, but I have a feeling they won’t. That leaves it up to a 3rd party. So far I’m not aware of any decent alternative. I know a lot of people are fans of 1Password but I gather they’re really targeted at saving your web passwords, which is still a useful feature but not really what I’m after.
So it’s kind of a weird thing. I’ve been a paying customer of a service I’ve gotten value out of for nearly 10 years. Now Apple is replacing this service with something free that doesn’t do what I originally paid for. Oh well, I hear iCloud supports Windows Vista.
No Comments Yet
There are no comments yet. You could be the first!