iCloud Beta

The beta website for iCloud is now up and running at www.beta.icloud.com and as you can see below it now shares the graphic stylings of soon to be launched IOS 7 probably September 10th of 11th in line with the launch of the new iPhone 5S and (maybe) 5C.

Of course, this is an on-line web based service so it isn't going to be remotely connected to IOS and in fact at the moment you cannot access the iCloud website on an IOS device (probably because most of the functions : Pages, mail, notifications etc are in-built into the iPhone and iPad). The rebranding to IOS style then seems a little pointless. The interesting thing however is that this sees the launch (admittedly in beta) of the Apple iWorks apps : Keynote, Pages and 123 on line. Essentially I suppose they are competing with google drive (docs as was) and having had a quick play it seems to work OK - it is a direct replication of how the iWorks suite works on Mac (you have the option when pressing CMD and 'O' to open up on-line cloud docs or search from Finder or just open docs on the tool bar - pretty efficient and useful (although as the service is now totally web based the on-line doc access isn't massively fast as it accesses the cloud servers at Apple). It now enables users to work on their documents from any work station - although I'm not a PC user currently (PC Lap top died yesterday!) I assume the on-line elements will work on any PC browser. Lastly and importantly, according to tutorials that appear when you first log in it is possible to drag and drop word, pages, excel, 123 etc docs from your desktop into the cloud browser - this facility kind of makes iCloud a much more useful multi machine resource to me and will assist in work flow and accessibility which sits at the core of what I do massively.

It's worth noting that although the iWorks apps are also now in the main 'old' iCloud site as beta's I couldn't make them work on this version so I've now moved across to the iCloud Beta site permanently - remember this is still a beta though and it's likely that as more people locate it and switch it will slow down and crash.

Plus as an aside, make sure you check out the latest episode of my medical insurance podcast. PMICast Season 2 Episode 1 is now on iTunes and streamable from www.pmicast.podbean.com