The Importance of iCloud.
Apple has been criticized in the past for its weak cloud efforts, but with the announcement of iCloud that’s all changing. MobileMe was nice but half baked at best, Steve Jobs even joked about it during his keynote, “Now you might ask, why should I believe them, they’re the ones that brought me MobileMe.” So why should we now trust Apple in the cloud? Steve Jobs is a perfectionist, years ago he asked for a computer to be designed without any screws, when the design was brought to him with a single hidden screw he went ballistic. Imagine the hell the MobileMe team went through in the first few months when the service was being riddled with problems. In a recent Fortune article that gave us a rare view of how Apple operates, Steve was said to have gathered the entire MobileMe team and lambasted them. Steve was quoted asking,”Can anyone tell me what MobileMe is supposed to do?” Having received a satisfactory answer, he continues, “So why the fuck doesn’t it do that?” By the look of things, it’s safe to say that they got their act together.
So what is different about iCloud? Why all the hype? Theres a host of other products that do the same thing, Google docs, calendar, and mail, theres DropBox, and Box.net why are people making such a big deal about iCloud? For one reason. It just works. The average person won’t start searching for and setting up multiple services for all the things they want in the cloud. With iCloud the only interaction on the users part is signing in with their Apple ID while setting up the phone, and thats it. The service is integrated so thoroughly and seamlessly that there is nothing new to learn, things just start working. Suddenly songs, photos, calendars, apps, books and documents are on all of your devices. Best of all iCloud is free, there are literally no fences getting in the way of iCloud being widely adopted and used by all iOS users. Once your iPhone, iPod, Mac, iPad and Apple TV are in sync with each other it will be very hard to switch to a new platform. No one else has complete control over all aspects of the hardware and software like Apple. They built a ecosystem that was years in the making, and once all the parts come together it will be exceedingly difficult to replicate the seamless experience. Apple’s iCloud rained on everyones picnic, and now Google, and Microsoft are surely scrambling to get their services up to par.
One of the most important aspects of iCloud is that it cuts the cord and allows us to really be PC free. No longer do we need to sync our computers and phones to get our information and documents, the PC is now just another device that syncs with the cloud. Now Apple can truly say, welcome to the post PC world.
On Doctypes
When a creating a new web page (the right way) the first thing you’ll do is set your doctype on the top of the page.
Simply put, the doctype of the page tells the browser how to render the page – by telling the browser what sort of document this is. You may not know this, but CSS rules are interpreted differently based on the doctype of the page. There are other implications too, but the differences in appearance is the only practical thing you need to worry about.
(What’s that? You don’t care about the meaning of each doctype? Skip ahead to what you should be using)
