Solve problems and unlock iCloud’s hidden superpowers.
When duped contacts strike, don’t fight the urge to merge.
Having a lot of friends is great, but not if they’re duplicates in your Address Book. If iCloud has left you with multiple copies of some or all of your contacts, open Address Book on your Mac, click Card > Look For Duplicates, then click Merge in the resulting dialog. This will combine multiple cards with the same name but different contact details into single cards with all information associated with the name. After merging, your cleaned-up contact data will be synced back to iCloud and your other devices.
iCloud plays peacemaker when it has to.
Revising files with Documents in the Cloud is supposed to be seamless. And it usually is, unless you edit a file on one device and then make changes to the same file on another device before the first changes are pushed out by iCloud. When that happens, your application will display an alert asking which version of the file you’d like to save. You can save them all or just one by selecting each version you like and tapping the Keep button. The files will be saved to your device—and the cloud—with a number appended to the name, so you know which is which.
Make a Smart Playlist like this one to see all upgradable tracks.
After turning on iTunes Match, it’s easy enough to see the status of your music files (Matched, Uploaded, and more), but it’s not so easy to organize tracks that are eligible for new high-quality downloads. To do that, you need to build a Smart Playlist. Set its media type to Music media with a bit rate less than 256Kbps. Option-click on the next plus button to create a condition in which any of the following are true: iCloud Status is Matched and iCloud Status is Purchased. Now you’ve got some downloading to do!
Uncover iCloud’s inner Dropbox.
If you wish Documents in the Cloud was more like Dropbox, take matters into your own hands. On your Mac, go to System Preferences > iCloud and turn on Documents & Data. In the Finder, Option-click Go > Library, and then navigate to the Mobile Documents folder inside. Leaving the folders there alone (they belong to applications already using your iCloud storage), you can now drop your own files and folders into Mobile Documents to push them to the same folder on other Macs with Documents & Data enabled. It’s a slick workaround for older machines that can’t use AirDrop.
