In a previous article on Webtops I listed but did not review iCloud and I promised the company I would review it at a later date. My first impressions were a little down on the product and then I realised I was using Firefox and that interface was still in alpha and to fully experience the service I needed to dust off IE8. iCloud does not work at all in Chrome.
To say that iCloud has a lot of built in functionality is a massive understatement. Under the applications tabs lies sections devoted to utilities, development, business, media, internet, productivity, games and widgets. The problem I found with iCloud was that if you used the built in facilities such as Write, there was no problem but the services does not interact well with outside packages.
For example, in iCloud Write I chose Open and then opted for the upload I chose a Word 2003 file to import into iCloud but it didn’t show any text. That happened on two files. Similarly on the Photo application I uploaded two JPG files and although the white squares were there showing they had uploaded but there was no photograph. This happened in both IE8 and Firefox. When I tried to delete the two uploaded files by dragging them to the trashcan, the system deleted one but would not delete the other. Right clicking and using the Delete function didn’t work either. So at the moment there is a file – albeit benign – that is squatting in the Net over which I have no real control.
In Write there was also an overlap between the background and the application which hid the menu bar and this sort of distraction doesn’t lead to seamless use.
iCloud gives you your own iCloud email account and sending a test message went without a hitch but the reply never got there! A fresh email to iCloud arrived as a pop up but when it was clicked on it just disappeared and was not stored within the main email module.
Although this sounds all very critical iCloud is still in beta and while it is not capable of sustaining business use I would not write it off and will revisit it from time to time to see how it is progressing. IT may be that the problems I encountered may be my system but it is not tweaked to be power-used and all faults occurred in both IE8 and Firefox so they cannot be blamed on browser configuration. As far as I know my Flash and other add ons are up to date and working as they are supposed to, I haven’t had any warning pop ups.
If anyone has feedback on iCloud feel free to comment.
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