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.

Yeah, thats the Quick Bar right now. A huge drain of Twitter’s cool.

1. The Tethering Convenience Fee

2. The iPad Bait and Switch

My only thoughts are that maybe, just maybe, Apple has a way to rectify this before June 7th during the WWDC keynote. I mean, I cant imagine Steve Jobs being happy with this considering AT&T is the only option for people who buy one of his fancy 3G iPads.

Update: I totally missed John Gruber’s take on this, same as mine. (link)

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.

I saw this the other day. I can’t wait until they get it running on the iPad too.

On monday Meebo released their client for iPhone. They had announced this well over a year ago during the iPhone OS 3.0 preview event saying how they needed Push Notifications to do what they really wanted to do. The first time they presented the app for aproval was last week.

After using it for a few days I am willing to replace my copy of AIM with it. The colors are very light and it feels inviting to type. The client can save and read your history online, this is what I thought even Trillian was missing (on the mac at least, never tried to play with the iPhone version).

My biggest problem with it so far is that it still doesn’t have metacontacts. Hopefully that’s coming sooner, rather than later.

While I’ve been waiting for this App for a while, it has outdone my expectations. The other mobile IM applications have been put on notice… specially the $10+ dollar ones.

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.

I must say, the most annoying thing about AT&T in the past few years is not the obviously bogged down network and their inability to really make their service of any quality at all. This video seems to be a step in the right direction, at least for me.

As their network keeps getting drowned in more iPhones, they really expected people to do the New Years Resolution thing, where theyd get bored with the phone and stopped using it as time went by. Sadly for them, the iPhone is the one device that really makes the internet completely accessible and people just keep using it more and more.

The video, I thought was a joke at first, but it seems legit. Lets hope it is a sign of things to come, a new, more open AT&T that mans up to its shortcomings and stops treating its customers like children that just wouldn’t understand their complicated network.

Oh… MMS on iPhone, September 25th. An actual date! amazing!

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.