MOTUnation.com

Hello, everyone.

I am pretty annoyed that iCloud will drop most of the things I liked about it and give me new things I don't need or like.

What I loved about MobileMe was:

- The Backup app: I could have automatic backups sent up there for little things like my contacts, calendars and bookmarks. Also, I set the backup app for my dad in such a way that every week his Documents folder would automatically go to Apple's server without him even needing to think about it.

- The iWeb app... it was stupid easy to set up a quick website and to upload it ready to be used.

- The Public Folder in iDisk... it was so nice to allow clients to upload and download big files from there.

Could you recommend a different service that will allow me to do those things?

Thanks!

I can't recommend an alternative but this is the big iCloud issue. The service is changeable or revocable at any time. On top of that, they also have your data.

That's too big a price to pay for the relatively little convenience, IMO.

I see your point.

However, I'm not too concerned about the privacy issue because I just send up there non-critical files (address book, iCal and Safari bookmarks). My dad is almost retired, and his documents (mostly short stories and novels) don't contain financial data or anything like that (I'd never upload that kind of stuff unless it was encrypted in a disk image!).

What I miss is having the convenience of having all those features I mentioned under one place.

I don't understand what made Apple change their service for the worse. They broke something that was working just fine, IMO.

Of course I will still need iCloud for the iPhone-computer-iPad syncing. But what about the rest?

iCloud is still in public beta

Good question f., one that I have been putting off pondering myself. The main thing I will miss is iDisk, although slow and kind of clunky it's been so handy, I use it almost everyday.

I'm using Dropbox currently which integrates very well with iPad. There's also an app that will allow you to 'point' to a folder/file on your mac to sync through Dropbox so you don't necessarily have to move it into Dropbox.

Other choices are listed here:
http://alternativeto.net/software/idisk/

http://oldtoadstutorials.net/No.23.html

Main problem for me is I'm still on Snow Leopard and don't want to go Lion, but I need the other features of iCloud.

I doubt you'll find one service that does all this. I've cribbed together things with various tools over time.

Time Machine and iCloud are a reasonable start for backup and syncing bookmarks, notes, calendars etc. For email using IMAP makes it look like your email is synced (I can't figure out what iCloud email sync add). This is zero effort on my part.

For most other things, I have my own domain with a few 100G of storage for a very small annual payment. I've set up simple drag and drop things on my laptop using Transmit to manage a public and a private area to share things with others, and I have a little boiler plate PDF to explain to others how to get and retrieve things there if they are not regular users. This requires a little effort, but it's very simple and repetitive. I can mount a subdomain or folder from this domain on the Lion or SL Desktop using "Go To server" for read, or Transmit for read and write. These things take a a minute or so to do the first time, but then it's a click after that.

I haven't come up with a simple quick way to create a web site, but for pictures, the web pages created in Aperture work fine for me.