SAN FRANCISCO — Apple CEO Steve Jobs briefly emerged from a medical leave Monday to unveil a free service that lets customers share calendar entries, songs and other files among their devices more easily.
The company also announced new software to make Mac computers behave more like mobile d
evices and Apple’s mobile devices more like rival smartphones.
Jobs received a standing ovation as he appeared at Apple Inc.’s annual developers’ conference, his second major public appearance since he went on medical leave in January for unspecified reasons.
He left many of the specific announcements to top executives, but he made the iCloud announcement himself.
An iCloud account will store user information from several devices, including iPhones and iPads, and make sure the same contacts, calendar events and files are available on all of them. It also backs up the data on Apple’s servers. It mimics Google’s Docs system for online files, and products from smaller online-storage firms such as Dropbox.
ICloud will also allow customers to store their music online. Buy a song on iTunes once, and it will be available on up to 10 devices.
The basic service will be free for now and replaces a $99-a-year Apple service called MobileMe, which Jobs said “was not our finest hour.”
For $25 a year, iTunes will be able to scan a computer’s hard drive for music files that have been converted from CDs or come from other sources. If the same songs are available in the iTunes store, they’ll be added to the iCloud locker. That means there’s no need to purchase the songs again or upload them.
ICloud could give users a wide array of music for their iPhones, iPads and Wi-Fi-capable iPods, without having to connect them to their home PCs to transfer songs. Google Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. have launched similar services.
The music portion of iCloud is available right away, with remaining features coming in the fall.
At the conference, Apple also unveiled an operating system update for Mac computers called Lion. With it, Apple is expanding the ways finger-touches can be used to control the software. For instance, with the swipe of the fingers over the Mac trackpad, the user can switch from one program to another.
In another nod to bringing the computer closer to the iPhone and iPad, Apple is adapting more of its programs to run in a special full-screen mode, in addition to the traditional “window” mode.
Lion will be available to consumers next month for $30. A preview version was made available Monday to software developers.
Apple also unveiled updates to its software for iPhones and iPads. It will present notifications of new emails, missed calls and other events in a more intelligent fashion, reminiscent of the way Google Inc.’s Android smartphone software already does.
How Apple’s iCloud works
If the iCloud service works as promised, users will no longer need to connect their iPhones or iPads to their computers to move photos, music or files from one device to the other.
For photos, documents and other content that users create themselves, any device running iCloud will automatically upload those files via the Internet to Apple Inc.’s massive new data center in rural North Carolina.
Photos snapped on an iPhone, for example, will be stored in an individual’s iCloud account. An iPad or Mac computer logged into the same account will automatically download that photo to keep all the devices in sync.
The same applies to email, calendars, contacts and documents. That puts Apple in direct competition with similar services offered by Google Inc., such as Gmail and Google Documents.
The iCloud music service goes several steps further.
First, people will be able to download anything they purchased on iTunes to any device they own.
A new feature called iTunes Match will also scan devices for any music not purchased on iTunes, For $25 a year, users will be able to access any of the 18 million songs available on iTunes that match their own collections. Finally, any music they own but that isn’t available in the iTunes store will be uploaded to their iCloud accounts.
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
