Open the Settings app and select iCloud. From there go down to the “Storage & Backup” button. Once you tap that you’ll see where you can enable the iCloud backup and start a manual backup.

Once you enable it and create a backup to start, you can tap on “Manage Storage” which will show you any and all device backups on your iCloud. Taping on any of those will bring you a menu where you can select individual apps that get backed up, or not.

On my iPad, I dont want to backup my pictures because I’m going to let Photo Stream do that. I also dont want to backup my comic books or my Wired magazines. I unchecked those three apps and the backup size went from 4.8GB to 873MB. That’s more like it!

Disabling images on my iPhone (for the same reasons) allowed me to go from 1.7GB to 233MB on the iPhone.

I now have two devices backing up to my iCloud and they only take around 1GB of my 5GB of storage.

I expect Apple to allow you to purchase more storage once the service actually goes live but I feel like this is the better solution either way. There are just things you dont need in the event of getting a replacement for a iCloud enabled device.

Open Source software is here, it has been here, and it is the future.

The problem with Open Source software is that openness gives you too many options, everyone can contribute code and modify it to do the task at hand. You then have open source projects that need a governing body to handle releases and they limit the scope of that project.

For example you have Firefox, if you are feeling adventurous you can download he nightly snapshots or branch your own version. Mozilla will never support your branch but you’re welcome to do it. If you take Drupal, this is a project that the White House has taken and they’ve even contributed code back. The release of Drupal 7 is just a group of selected features and not the whole collective knowledge and improvements that the community has made to it.

The underlying tech for OS X and iPhone OS is Darwin. Darwin is an open source distribution of Linux (Now called PureDarwin), much like Red Hat Linux and Ubuntu. (Apple’s OS X 10.6 open source projects)

Apple’s systems are closed, yes, but they’re easily opened.

As far as I know Apple has yet to go after any jailbreakers. Last year they claimed that it violated their copyright, but that was about it. I actually believe this to be proof that part of their contract with the music and movie studios requires them to take measures to secure their content and not that Apple is trying to stop it. I mean, any google search can give you a handful of ways to jailbreak the phone no takedown notices to be found.

Do I agree with the App Store approval process? Absolutely not.

My problem is not that there is a process however, my problem is with the secrecy. My problem is with apps that have played by the rules and have not been approved because Apple does not feel like it. Am I upset that all the boob and swimsuit apps are gone? Not really. Am I upset Google Voice isn’t there? You bet.

At the end of the day I am left at a decision I have to make.

If Apple and Google go their separate ways, which one will I follow? At this point, Google

Google has Android, and no matter how much I complain about how complicated I find it to use, its just because I have not given it all the attention I could have. If i had to use it on an everyday basis I’m sure I’d be more than happy with it. Having a choice in manufacturers also gives you the ability to pick a phone that you really feel is right for you (physical keyboard or not). Oh and Android is also built on Linux.

I feel like I can give my iPad to my mom and she will be able to just enjoy it and not have to deal with settings and confusing dialogues. Things that I am okay dealing with, I do not feel “trapped”, I do not feel “limited” and at the same time I do not feel entitled.

One of Cory Doctorow’s big hang-ups with the iPhone and the iPad are that they should have a “hidden setting” that enables me to jailbreak the OS and install any application I want and that way it would be sanctioned by Apple. While this would be nice I think its just cynical to believe that they do not do it because they want to hurt innovation. They do not put that setting there because then they’d have to support it. They’d have all sorts of people coming into the Apple Store complaining about how their phones got messed up and the reason for the mess-up was an app that was not on the App  Store.

When I mess up my phone because I messed with it, I know I cant expect help from Apple, they warned me this would happen. Just like back in the day when I installed LiteStep on my Windows machine and it took over Explorer.exe and I couldn’t figure out a way to get either of them to show up, it wasn’t an option on Windows “install LiteStep” or I would have been tempted to call Microsoft for support.

I have the best of both worlds on my phone, I have a very controlled App Store experience that has given developers like EA and Capcom the confidence on a platform to release excellent games on it (Go try out Street Fighter IV on the iPhone), and I also have a completely open environment where I can change anything I want on the phone through the Jailbroken app stores.

I’ve had to do a complete recovery restore from my iPhone since I’ve been jailbreaking. I’ve also had to format my Windows machine when I was messing with it. These are things I am okay doing and everyone that is interested in how technology works should do.

You know who shouldn’t do it? My mom.

For me, this would be a second (third) device. I have my iPhone for walking around, I have my MacBook Pro for working at my desk and I’d have the iPad for everything in between like recipes while cooking and looking for stuff on the internet while watching TV. It would definitely be a better device to have by my nightstand if i wanted to quickly catch up with news from bed because at 1.5 lb its still light enough to carry with one hand. The laptop always seemed awkward in bed.

Then he announced the price.

I have wasted $500 on other things that I dont find nearly as useful as I would find having an iPad would be (my original MiniDisk player comes to mind.) I am, however, the fanboy. I will buy this device because I like playing with shiny new toys. Where I think this will be amazing, is in the hands of my mom.

For people like my mom, the $500 price tag and the gorgeous UI makes total sense.

My mom doesn’t really deal with computers often. Her computer was kind of acting up and she decided to get a new one, she got a netbook. Now she has a contract and a computer thats too slow to actually do anything useful. On top of that, it uses Windows XP which is not really a OS that is inviting to the user, you use it because you have to not because you want to.

60 days from now I am going to be getting a iPad in the mail. I will play with it thoroughly and then I will give it to my mom. The iPhone OS is intuitive and she will be able to get things done faster. She’ll learn to love the internet because she wont have to fight with it most of the time. She’ll be able to do e-mail without worrying about getting a virus or forgetting what the email address of her contacts are because everything syncs with the cloud. Most of her documents are on Google Docs now anyways so she can just work right on the cloud with the device and not worry about losing her USB thumbdrive or anything like that. For the longer projects, a cheap bluetooth keyboard allows her to work with iWork and really get presentations and projects done in a flash (She’s a teacher.)

Best of all, there are zero headaches. It just works. There are no configurations that can go wrong, there are no drivers she has to update, there is no way she can accidentally lose information. How do I know this? Because I’ve been using iPhone OS for 2.5 years now and the urge of moving to Android always subsides when I think of that.

I was not impressed with the iPad when I saw it because I didn’t see the possibilities for people who really just want to move on from having to deal with “computers” but cant just use their phones as their main device.

When my dad plays with my mom’s iPad I’m sure he’ll want one too. I’ll hand him the one I got to replace the one I gave to my mom, just in time for me to buy v2 sometime next year.

With a possible 10″ display and multi-touch gestures, I would love to have this device be on my coffee table. I already have a laptop there most of the time and this would be so much better. This brings me back to the problem of print. If the device is basically a $600 glorified e-reader which doesn’t even do the job right because it doesn’t have an e-ink display, then I don’t want it. I don’t read newspapers, I don’t read magazines. I am subscribed to Wired Magazine, but I mainly read it online through their RSS feed. It needs to do more, it needs to blow me away and not just show me how much I can read. Print needs to understand that while I am ok paying for access to information, eventually it will make its way out. The gatekeepers are gone and any artificial ones they put up just prove that they don’t understand and that they deserve to be irrelevant.

With this said, I am more excited about what might be included in the new iPhone OS (4.0 maybe?) and on the new iPhone model they might announce tomorrow.

If its $600 and amazing, I have the money. If it’s more or just a glorified e-reader, I’ll pass. If its subsidized and needs a mobile contract, then you can just forget I even spent any time thinking about the thing. I don’t need more bills.

Apple told everyone that they had to wait until 3.1 for Augmented Reality apps to be approved on the iPhone 3GS. Yelp, did it anyways in the form of an easter egg.

I am so happy about this and at the same time I am having a very severe case of iPhone 3GS envy… I have convinced myself that I do not need the new phone because my 3G is good enough but it is just so cool to see these applications start to leak out.

When Apple announces 3.1 (My bet is during the iPod event that’s been rumored on 9.9.9) all of these little apps are going to take over. I mean remember three years ago when all of the talk was on Jeff Han’s multitouch TED presentation? Then we got the iPhone and it became reality. Then the dream was to have applications to do everything from banking to gaming inside of your little-wonder device. That is now also true. Augmented Reality is just as big of a jump and we are getting right against it now.

Source: Mashable

Well that was then. Now we have the app store and I have purchased more than $50 worth of apps helping Apples profit margins that much more. It is really a shame that I cant justify supporting Apple anymore even though they were the ones that finally cracked the smartphone code. The reason for this is once again AT&T.

Ive been talking to a few people in the last few weeks and I completely understand the argument that they have to defend their network and ward against bandwidth hogs, but there is no excuse if theres a cap. Additionally where are the upgrades they’ve been promising? As Apple keeps selling iPhones, AT&T has positioned itself as the paragon of mediocrity from the start by failing to keep up with network demands.

If you have a Blackberry on AT&T your sling player works through 3G, on iPhone they waited until the app was in for approval to change the T.O.S. and disallow apps like those and then tapped Apple. If you have a Blackberry on AT&T, you got Google Voice as an app a few weeks ago, on iPhone they asked Apple to go on a witch hunt for anything that said Google Voice on it. The idea that people might find that their prices are artificially high and might switch to an innovative new service scares the shit out of them. This however will be AT&T’s undoing.

The reason why the problem is with AT&T and not with Apple is because I am sure Apple doesn’t care.
Apple’s main problems are with apps resembling each other and causing confusion. Other than that Apple should want all these applications to run on their platform but AT&T has been meddlesome and has created more problems than Apple could have ever imagined. That is why Apple’s inability to come up with a fair approval process that rewards innovation and doesn’t punish it has made many uneasy and has spawned competition. Cydia.

Cydia is an app store for jailbroken apps that spawned after the team behind the original jailbroken app store Installer.App took their sweet ass time releasing the code as open source (as they had promised) and sparked fears of another walled garden. They have a pay model that accepts Paypal and Amazon Payments. There is no approval process and if one repository goes down there’s a million more.

The best part of this is that AT&T has no power to do anything about it. They disallowed GVmobile on the App Store? It went FREE on Cydia the day after. They don’t allow bandwidth hogs from using the 3G network? There’s an app that disables the switch that tells apps what network they are on and always claims you are on WiFi.

AT&T needs to know its role as a dumb pipe and give up its sad excuse for an argument that they bring anything to the table. This would allow them to stop concocting plans that limit the iPhone’s true potential and gives them a strategic advantage of having the most open network for a nominal fee. The iPhone runs great on T-Mobile and would run great on any other GSM carrier if we had any others. Others will come however and once LTE starts rolling out this illusion of competition that the CDMA and GSM carriers have been able to keep up for so long will slowly fade away.

AT&T either positions itself as the first open carrier or it dies when somebody does it and leaves them in the dust as the antiquated steam of shit that they are.

Stop developing for the App Store, start developing for iPhone through Cydia.

iPhone

• Improved camera, with auto-focus
• Camera can now record video
• New phone looks like old phone, without metal band
• Pricing will expand to a $99 iPhone, with 8GB, 16GB and 32GB models available
• Faster Processor (1.5x faster)
• More RAM

Things that I do not expect to be on the iPhone which I would LOVE to see:

• Front facing camera
• OLED screen
• A design that goes with my UNIBODY mac-book a bit more

iPhone Firmware 3.0

• AT&T will announce how much tethering will be… I expect $20 on top of whatever plan you have

Things that I do not expect to be on the 3.0 release but I would LOVE to see:

• Google Voice support. This wont happen since Google has not pretended to be working on getting it ready for public release.
• Built-in VoIP SIP support.

Snow Leopard

• Release date before Windows 7 (August)
• Preview of new unified design for all software

Other

• MacBook speed bumps

Things that I do not expect but would be nice to see:

• AppleTV upgrade to compete a bit more closely with ROKU and other streaming devices (Boxee)

Well thats about it. See you guys on the flip side. I still have the E3 roundup of what I thought personally coming up just been tying up some loose ends around the house.

John Gruber from DaringFireball got it 100% right. My predictions were not too bad either, but he was just spot on.

The main thing here is the change in manufacturing process. They are leaving a lot of things open for the future. I personally like the choice of the Mini Display Port instead of an HDMI slot. HDMI is a secured architecture that requires you to pay royalties and is basically created just so that applications have permission from the MPAA to play your content. I am not a fan of this. Apple is basically marking a line in the sand, saying computers are here, media centers are there.

Like always leave it to Apple to not try and do a all-in-wonder product. That is why I like them. My new MacBook Pro will be here next week and I can’t be any more excited. I recommend you step by Daring Fireball and read Gruber’s post on why Apple didn’t release a $899 laptop, its worth the read.

Engadget and Gizmodo both ran a story last night showing a two-tone MacBook Pro. All aluminum but with black keys like the MacBook Air. Additionally it’s screen takes a cue from the current generation iMacs with a full glass screen with black borders. It did not seem to have a trackpad button, kind of confirming that it will have a glass trackpad.

I’m going to go ahead and say I believe that is the actual new MBP. The ‘brick’ is most likely the new manufactoring process in which the laptop is engineered out of a hollowed out piece of aluminum.

Early reports show that it has some kind of new port that is smaller than microDVI. While talking to a friend we kind if agreed this has to be a way for them to get HDMI and DVI support into the machines, maybe even eSATA (which I woiuld love to see). This will go nicely with Nvidia’s hybrid dual-SLI graphics, the machines will run the new Core Animation powered Photoshop like if it were chess.app.

I believe there will be a change to the MacBook Air today aswell even If it’s just a processor update. I believe there will be a update to the MacBook, but I doubt they’d be turning aluminum. I favor the though that a new 13″ MBP will be introduced.

The rumored $899 device will be a monitor or display unit of some sort. We haven’t seen any hardware leaks to give validity to the thought that it’s a ‘netbook’.

I agree with John Gruber that we will not see a refresh of iWork or of iLife today, I believe those will come at MWSF’09 with Snow Leopard.

I want to just write down that appart from eSATA, which would be nice, what I really want is an user acessible hard drive bay. If I find a cheap SSD, I don’t want to void my warranty just to update it.

Well that’s about it. Let’s see how off base I am, and let’s see if I end up getting a laptop from this batch.

Update 1: John Gruber over at Daring Fireball posted a full preview and he is way smarter than I am, and more connected. (Thanks to fontgoddess to pointing this out over twitter, I would have probably have missed it until after the event.)

Then there was the App Store way. If you make sure you are in the iTunes App Store you could select log in, then create an account and select ‘none’ for payment method. This has sadly also been disabled it seems like.

The only way that is still working as far as I know is with a gift card. Before you panic and say how gift cards cost money, Starbucks has a promotion with Apple called the Song of the Week. These cards work as gift cards and are free right at the counter of most Starbucks.

Go to the iTunes Music Store select ‘Redeem’ it should be on one of the side columns. It will then ask you for your redeem code. Once you enter in it will ask you for your information, but under payment options you will now be able to select ‘none’.

Because you probably don’t want to head to the nearest Starbucks right now here are a few codes to get you started. Please post a comment letting me know you used them, and if you get a few please post them as a comment as well. Let’s snowball this

These Expire October 31, 2008:

1. RPWTA3WLWYNE
2. K9P3LPNXF3RN
3. 9H7RWRPXRLA9
4. APYLJL6NA474
5. 6JJ4YETHXJRT