On June 6, Apple announced the latest incarnation of its OS X operating system: 10.7, more commonly known as Lion. Also announced were the imminent release of iOS 5 for Apple’s mobile devices and, hand-in-hand with that, the iCloud.

Folks who’ve been handy with Apple’s products for a few years now might recognize the source of this “new” service as MobileMe (née .Mac), the yearly membership with an email address, online storage, and push syncing for your mobile devices.

But iCloud is more than just a name change. Apple is revamping the service to expand its offerings and its reach. MobileMe used to cost $99 a year to subscribe. iCloud will be free to anyone using iOS 5, that is to say, anyone with an iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch capable of running the new software when it comes out this fall.

And as Apple says, for free, you get a lot. iCloud, like MobileMe, will continue to push-sync your contacts, calendars, and email, but it will also do the same with your photos, documents, and purchased content like apps, music, and books. It even uses that syncing feature to back up your device’s content and settings, so that plugging in to your computer to sync becomes nigh a thing of the past. New devices that ship with iOS 5 can even be activated through iCloud if you already have a membership. Apple is slowly but surely removing the computer from the equation.

But the thing I’m most excited for is the music. You can push new purchased music to your device directly, or access your purchase history and re-download songs you’ve already bought. And, for a yearly fee of $25, you can “match” up to 25,000 songs you didn’t purchase from the iTunes store (so, stuff you either ripped from your CD collection or, ahem, acquired) with iTunes Plus-quality content and download it to your devices whenever you want. Simply put, iTunes says, “oh, I see you have this song in your library, but you didn’t buy it from me. Oh well, it’s your song. Here, have my version if you want to listen to it. It’s encoded at 256K, so it’s probably loads better than that 128K version you pirated or the 192K version you ripped five years ago.”  You know what I say to that? “Gee, thanks iTunes!”

But even with this stable full of awesome new features, a little caution is warranted. As much as Apple declared its MobileMe service “just works,” there are plenty of users out there (me included) who can tell you it sometimes doesn’t. If you don’t understand how push syncing works, you can often end up with duplicate and even triplicate contacts or calendar events. And Apple’s servers, like all servers, do sometimes go down. There can be cons to relying too heavily on someone else’s storage space for all your stuff. And will those remote backups be more useful for troubleshooting, or will they, like the computer backups, be basically useless if you’re trying to remedy a software bug? And I don’t even want to think about the poor souls who share one big iTunes library, and thus whose devices are filled with content purchased by a handful of different AppleID accounts.

So the moral of the story? iCloud could be as revolutionary and awesome as Apple wants you to think it will be, or it could be a big old mess. I’m pretty sure it will wind up somewhere in the middle.

Probably leaning a little more toward awesome.

Thanks to Apple for the image!

Sometimes MSpaint just won’t cut it, but you can’t justify spending the money for Photoshop. What are your other options?  Take a look at Splashup, a free web based image editor with many of the most commonly used tools for tweaking images for the casual user.

The left side toolbar has crop, rotation, marquee, type, erase, and many shape tools, just like a real image editor! You can choose foreground and background colors and it preserves multiple undo/redo states.

Across the top menu bar there’s (of course) “File” with such favorites as “open”, “save”, “close”, etc. “Image” let’s you set the image and canvas sizes, “Layer” and “Selection” let you manipulate the layers and your current selection respectively.  Filter (see below) let’s you use some of the most often used Photoshop-like filters and control such elements as contrast, color, and hue.  Finally “View” let’s you go from windowed mode into fullscreen and manage your zoom level.

Sure, it’s not a full professional image editing suite.  It’s also not several hundred dollars and multi-gigabyte installation.  It’s online, lightweight, cross platform and best of all, free!

Check it out and edit your images today. http://splashup.com/

Google and Microsoft are two of the more visible companies that are pushing the cloud computing frontier.  There are several advantages to computing in the cloud; your files are available from whatever computer you’re on as long as you have a network connection, you don’t have to worry about backups, etc.  There is a downside to the cloud though.

Basically cloud computing is using applications for productivity that live on the internet, not on the computer you’re working on.  Google Docs and Microsoft’s soon to be released internet based version of it’s flagship product Office are modern examples of cloud computing, but really any webmail (gmail, yahoo, hotmail, etc) could loosely be referred to as a cloud application.

My biggest concerns has always been privacy.  Your email, financial information, business contacts, etc are all saved on a third party companies servers.  There is always the possibility that there could be a security breach from the inside, or someone uses the password reset feature (these are sometimes very insecure) and gains access to your information.  What if the service is interrupted or you can’t log in or something goes missing, who can you call to fix it?

Right now, go to google.com and search for a phone number to contact someone at google if you have questions about your gmail account.  Don’t worry, I’ll wait…

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The fact is there’s no one to call if something goes wrong.

Lifehacker had a post the other day that summed up my concerns very succinctly.  Click below to check out the entire post.

http://lifehacker.com/5325169/the-hidden-risks-of-cloud-computing

[Photo by  http://www.flickr.com/photos/tomraven/]