Harvell - IConnected use AirPlay, iCloud, apps, and more to bring your Apple devices together

Use AirPlay, iCloud, Apps, and More
to Bring Your Apple Devices Together

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Introduction

So you want to know about iCloud and AirPlay. Good, youve come to the right place. I will, however, in my capacity as author and Apple aficionado, first need to take you on a short history of Apples online and streaming services before we reach the Promised Land that both products embody.

Yes, I appreciate that you probably want to know how to sync your e-mails or access iTunes purchases from your iPhone. I assure you, well get there soon. I simply think its important that you get a little perspective on iCloud (and a brief mention of the birth of AirPlay) before breaking down their features and usage. If youre really not in the mood for a history lesson, by all means skip to , but Ill do my best to keep things brief while filling you in on the ups and downs of Apples adventures online. You see, as much as both iCloud and AirPlay look like polished tools these days, things werent always this way.

As the word Internet became more frequently used and understood by the public in 1994, a partnership between AOL and Apple saw the launch of eWorld. With its colorful graphics and mock town square layout (see Figure I-1), it was a unique route to the web for those struggling to make sense of all this talk of superhighways and megabits, featuring an e-mail client, news reader, and communities (filled with ePeople!). eWorld, without marketing or advertising in a particularly troubling financial period for Apple, was ultimately a failure and the town closed its gates on March 31, 1996. While AOL took up the mantle with its web service and seemingly relentless free trials on CD (you know, the things you used as coasters throughout the late 1990s), Apple still harbored dreams of an online service.

Figure I-1

The town square layout of the eWorld interface in 1994

By the new millennium, the company had decided that a preceding i in a product name was far more trendy than an e, and it brought iTools (see Figure I-2) to the Mac in January 2000. iTools launched as a free product with four main selling points. First there was KidSafe, a website filter designed to alleviate fears that children would be instantly corrupted after typing three Ws into a web browser. Second, there was Mac.com, the beginning of the famed @mac.com e-mail address. iDisk offered a whopping 20MB of online storage accessed from the desktop, and then there was HomePage, a rudimentary website builder. At the launch of iTools, Steve Jobs, Apples then CEO, proclaimed Mac users can now do things on the Internet that Wintel users can only dream of. Later, Apple would update iTools to use WebDAV technology, allowing it to be used outside the Mac platform and developed an iTools application for Windows XP.

Figure I-2

iTools offered new features such as the @mac.com e-mail address

Its fair to say that the lure of Apples iTools and its replacement, .Mac, was chiefly the cachet of an @mac.com e-mail address, more advanced features were in the pipeline, however, as the service began to take the shape of the tools we know today. As Apples fortunes began to turn in the early 2000s, with consumers looking for an alternative to Windows and the idea of being a Mac user becoming cool again, iTools was renamed .Mac and several new features were introduced, including backup and a virus scanner provided by McAfee. In late 2002, over one hundred thousand users had subscribed to .Mac at the lofty cost of $99.99 per year with a free transition period for iTools users and a discounted rate. Additional features were added during the six-year run of .Mac, including an online photo and video sharing tool, up to 30GB storage (at additional cost), and enhanced e-mail service. During this period, in June 2004, Apple also announced the new AirPort Express base station featuring a protocol called AirTunes for streaming audio across a network. This would, of course, eventually become AirPlay. But now back to the online stuff.