Step 1: New or existing ID

First, go to the Settings > iCloud screen on your iOS device. By default, Apple will begin with the email address for the Apple ID you use to make purchases via the iTunes Store on your device entered into the sign-up field. If you want to use that ID to create your new iCloud ID, then go ahead and sign in. If not, click the “Get a Free Apple ID” link at the bottom of the Settings page.

If you choose to use an existing Apple ID, you’ll simply have to sign in with your credentials, then agree to iCloud’s terms and conditions. Apple will send out an account verification email to the address that is your Apple ID, which you can then follow a link from to complete the process.

If you choose to create a new Apple ID, you’ll be guided through the entire sign-up process on your iPhone or iPad.

Step 2: Grant permissions and set syncing preferences

Once verified, iCloud will automatically turn syncing on for most services, and ask your permission to either merge or replace data on your device, as well as use your location for Find My iPhone, iPad or iPod touch.

Whether to merge or replace your data is up to you. Merging is probably the safe bet in most cases, since even if you don’t yet have anything on the cloud, it won’t affect what you have on your device. Even in cases where you have a lot of duplicate information on your device and already on iCloud from a previous setup on your Mac or elsewhere, I’ve found that Apple’s service is smart about what to keep, and where to put what information, so there’s little clean-up required after the fact.

Step 3: Choose what syncs

You can selectively set which data does and doesn’t sync via iCloud once you have it set up on your device. Your options include Mail, Contacts, Calendars, Reminders, Bookmarks, Notes, Photo Stream, Documents & Data and Photo Stream.

For Documents & Data, you can choose to allow iCloud to sync that information either only over Wi-Fi, or over both Wi-Fi and 3G. As developers incorporate Documents in the Cloud into their apps, this will become more important for customers looking to ease their 3G mobile bandwidth usage.

Note that you can also opt to back up your device to iCloud. This will work the same as a backup in iTunes, allowing you to remotely restore your iPhone’s settings, some content and information. Note that this backs up the camera roll, account information, documents and settings. You’ll have to replace any movies or music from iTunes on your device manually, as well as reinstall any apps in the event of needing to restore from an iCloud backup.

Step 4: Download the apps

Apple’s iCloud works together with some official apps from Apple, too. To complete your iCloud experience, go ahead and download Find My iPhone and Find My Friends from the App Store. These will help you locate your own device should you lose it, locate friends and family on a map if they choose to share their location with you, and vice versa.

You can also grab Apple’s iWork apps from the App Store if you want to see Document syncing via iCloud in action, but note that these cost money.

The rest

iCloud comes free with 5 GB of storage, but if you shoot a lot of video or backup many devices to the service, you might just want to upgrade your storage options. $20 a year gets you 15 GB total, $40 per year allows for 25 GB, and $100 a year will provide 55 GB of iCloud storage. You can upgrade to each option (or downgrade for your next payment cycle) via the iCloud settings on your device.

It isn’t too difficult to set up, but I’d be curious to see what percentage of iOS buyers end up going through with it. Are you planning to use iCloud? If you are, do you foresee any reason to need to upgrade your storage level?

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Find My Friends. A new app that lets you locate family and friends who agree to share their location with you on a map. This is included free in iCloud, and you have lots of controls over privacy, including setting specific times for sharing.

Find My iPhone. Introduced under MobileMe, it’s included free with iCloud. Lets you track your registered devices should they get lost. Now works with Macs, too, under Lion.

Free email. iCloud borrows the Me.com domain from its predecessor to provide free email addresses to anyone who wants one.

Contact, calendar, reminder, bookmark, note syncing. Automatically, in the background, all the content listed as well as email will be synced across iOS 5 and Lion devices, so long as you’re signed in, have an active network connection (Wi-Fi or 3G) and have syncing turned on.

Photo Stream. View photos taken from your iPhone automatically in your iPad’s image gallery, or in iPhoto on the desktop, or on your Apple TV. Basically, take a photo once and have it everywhere. Photo Stream automatically takes your 1,000 latest photos and keeps them on iOS devices, plus you can opt to keep them in your Camera Roll permanently.

Documents in the Cloud. Shared libraries of cloud-based document storage will make it easy to start a document in an app on your iOS device and continue it on the desktop, or vice versa. This will gradually make its way out to third-party apps, too.

Backup and automatic downloads. You can now restore purchases of apps, books and music (U.S. only for now) to devices associated with your Apple ID, and also set them up to automatically download content you purchase elsewhere. Finally, you can back up your device’s settings, data and apps directly to iCloud and then restore from that should you need to do a fresh install.

5 GB free; storage upgrades available. Everyone gets 5 GB of iCloud storage (including your email, backups and other data) free, but if you need more you can pay to get it. $20 per year gets you an additional 10 GB of storage, $40 gets you 20 GB more and $100 secures 50 GB for a total of 55 GB.

iCloud will be available to all iOS 5 users when that update arrives on Oct. 12, and to Mac owners running OS X Lion at the same time.

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Distraction-free editing with WriteRoom

Hog Bay Software puts out a great distraction-free text editing app title called WriteRoom. Available on the iPhone, iPad and Mac, WriteRoom removes all menus, toolbars, and other user interface distractions from your view.

While it’s nice that WriteRoom works on all three platforms, you don’t want to get stuck worrying about which device holds the latest version. Enter DropBox. With DropBox, you can access your files in WriteRoom over the internet from each device. While WriteRoom on iOS natively supports access to DropBox, WriteRoom on OS X will require the use of the DropBox Mac client to help keep your files organized, but that’s a free download that’s easy to set up.

If you tend to leave your apps running on all three devices, one thing that you may need to do after making edits on your iOS device is select “Revert To Saved” from the File menu as you switch back to OS X. Going the other direction, the iOS version of WriteRoom will pick up on the edits you have made on OS X as you switch between active apps.

Unlike with  a few other DropBox-based text editors for iOS, I’ve also found that WriteRoom is capable of making edits when there is no network connectivity. There’s even a “Sync All Now” button on the DropBox configuration page for iOS devices. This will trigger a sync operation, and ensure that all of your devices have the edits you made while disconnected.

Save keystrokes with TextExpander

Smile’s TextExpander, which is also available on the iPhone, iPad and Mac, is another great tool for cross-platform productivity. Making every keystroke count, TextExpander has a user-configurable library of witty abbreviations that are used to replace the text as you type. It’s a little like a supercharged autocorrect. You type an abbreviation like “brb,” for example, and TextExpander will replace the abbreviation with “be right back.”  On OS X this works with all applications, as it is a system-wide service. TextExpander Touch for iOS depends on other app developers to support TextExpander’s API in order to bring in its abbreviation replacement features. Luckily, WriteRoom is one of many apps that support TextExpander’s iOS API.

TextExpander can handle more complex situations as well.  You can use it to insert the current date in any format you choose, and you can also control where the cursor will be placed after the abbreviation has replaced the text you’ve typed.  This is accomplished by placing a pipe character (“|”) in the definition of the abbreviation. Books like “Take Control of TextExpander,” websites like Alex Poslavsky’s snippet repository and even a video tutorial series can all teach you how to use TextExpander to its full potential.

Managing your abbreviation libraries on DropBox

Once you have TextExpander installed and enabled on your iOS and OS X devices, you will want to start selecting and defining what abbreviation libraries you want to use. You can use your own, but you can also grab predefined libraries in the app itself. Some even use TextExpander to automatically correct common misspellings and typos. Once you’ve decided which abbreviation libraries to use, you’ll want to keep them in sync on every device you type with. And that’s where TextExpander’s DropBox integration comes into play. You can configure TextExpander to sync its database of abbreviations to DropBox, so that any new abbreviation you define on your iPhone, will also be available for use on your iPad and Mac.

Not only have the developers of these solutions created great standalone products, but they’ve also created a collection of apps across all Apple platforms, which is the real key to creating lasting value for Mac and iOS users.

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Truth as used here has an inside technical meaning — the master or “truth” database in a distributed data system is the authoritative record for resolving conflicts. The master store in Apple’s existing Sync Services is the “truth database.” Here’s an image from Apple’s public documentation for Sync Services that illustrates the term.

In the existing Mac-centric sync model, the truth database is stored on the computer. Applications that want to interact with Sync Services don’t talk directly to the underlying database itself, but rather communicate through the Sync Engine, part of Mac OS X, which maintains the integrity, or truth, of the authoritative master data.

The other side to the “truth in the cloud” comment is that iCloud is more than just online document storage. Jobs made reference to this on Monday, saying:

Some people think the cloud is just a hard disk in the sky. We think it’s way more than that. iCloud is integrated with your apps, so everything happens automatically. It just works.

After a demonstration of iWork apps saving documents to the cloud, Jobs quickly added that iCloud Storage APIs would also include key value data. If Apple follows some of the existing conventions of Sync Services, developers would not interact directly with the master store, but would rely on system-level services, the APIs, to maintain the integrity of the cloud data. These system services will remove a tremendous burden from developers, making it much simple to integrate iOS apps with iCloud.

Syncing key-value pairs is also more flexible than syncing documents, and perfectly suited for several common uses. For example, to keep track of which levels are unlocked in a game like Angry Birds, the developer could update the key-value pair for each level independently from the others. In this scenario, the key might be the level id (“world-3-2″), and the value would be “locked” or “unlocked” as appropriate. It is simpler to fast sync just the one key-value pair that has changed instead of updating the entire settings file each time. This key-value pair approach also makes it much easier for developers to avoid situations where updating settings on one device would overwrite or erase all the settings on another device.

Some might be skeptical since Sync Services has suffered from a number of issues like mistaken duplication of contacts and calendar events. Jobs poked fun at Apple’s missteps with their previous cloud efforts when he said joked that users might ask “why should I believe them? They’re the ones that brought me MobileMe,” but he continued finished by admitting that while “it wasn’t [Apple's] finest hour,” the company “learned a lot.” Apple will have to put all of that learning to use to build a rock-solid online key-value store that can deal with billions of transactions coming from hundreds of millions of devices. That learning will be especially important when safe-guarding all that customer data in the key-value store.

Key-value stores have gained a lot of recent attention in web development circles because they offer a flexible, and fast, way to access small bits of data like user preferences. Solutions like MongoDB, Redis, Tokyo Cabinet, Memcache, Hadoop, MapReduce, Cassandra, Google’s BigTable , and Amazon’s Dynamo are all examples of web-friendly datastores that work with key-value pairs. Derrick Harris, over on our Structure channel, broke down how some of these technologies are being used to power the gear in Apple’s new data center, and highlighted a job listing which called for experience with key-value store technologies like Hadoop, Memcache and Cassandra.

iCloud is not just about online document storage, but a whole infrastructure for syncing data and preferences with an online key-value store — a new Sync Services built around the idea of keeping the truth database in the cloud instead of on a computer. The cloud is the new center of the Apple universe, in other words.

A ‘key’ difference (again, so sorry) between iCloud and other key-value stores is that Apple is focused on providing infrastructure for native iOS and Mac apps while others are working on platforms for web apps that run in the browser. Apple wants to make things “just work” for iOS apps without placing unnecessary burdens on developers as they incorporate iCloud services. This tension between open and fragmented and closed and integrated, which we’ve already seen in the Android and iPhone platforms, is being played out again here. But the fight is a good one for consumers, since it should lead to ever-better apps that test the limits of what we thought we could do with mobile devices.

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Backup, Backup and Backup

No matter what backup solution you use (Time Machine, online, manual), now is the time to run a full backup just in case. Additionally be sure you’ve synced all your iOS devices to your Mac. If you do “over the air” syncing you should be fine.

Just to be extra safe, I ran two additional backups within iCal. Under the File Menu in iCal is the Export Function. First, create a full iCal Archive under the Export Menu. That backs up your entire iCal calendar list en mass. However, I alo backed up each and every calendar to an .ics file by choosing each one and then going to File, Export, and then Export. This backs up each calendar manually.

Log Into MobileMe and Begin the Process

Now that you have triple redundancy on your calendars, you can begin the process. Log into your MobileMe account via Safari (just to play it safe don’t use alternate browsers) and then click the icon in the upper left for iCal, which is the familiar spiral day-at-a-time calendar icon. You should be presented with a window reminding you to “Upgrade to the new MobileMe Calendar.” Click “next” and you’ll be presented with the system requirements. Since CalDAV only works with Leopard or Snow Leopard, Tiger’s been fully de-clawed for iOS. If you fail to move to CalDAV your MobileMe calendar sync won’t work unless you move to 10.5 or 10.6 and if you do, Tiger will no longer sync without a third party helper like BusySync.

After confirming your devices meet the requirements, click “Upgrade Now” and the process begins. You’ll see a series of conformations that the calendars are being prepared and upgraded.

What’s happening in the background is your existing calendars that were synced with your computer and MobileMe are making their move off your computer and into the cloud. When complete, your calendars exist on MobileMe servers and your iCal merely provides another way of accessing them. Your iOS device should be smart enough to notice the change and modify itself as well. Now your calendars will exist on MobileMe’s servers and your other devices merely access the data, similar to the way IMAP works for email. Syncing is virtually instant since modifications are transferred directly to the cloud.

Trust, but Verify

Just to play it safe, I had some preset test routines ready to make sure everything when smoothly. I waited about 20 minutes to do the following to make sure all the changes propagated:

1. Add an item via iCal and verify it shows up on my iOS and Mac OS devices and MobileMe’s website
2. Add an item via each iOS device and verify it shows up on all other devices
3. Modify an event on each device and make sure that change shows up
4. If you have any calendars shared with someone, make sure they follow steps 1-3 for your calendar and you do the same for theirs, after they’ve also performed the upgrade

Snags, Errors, and General Weirdness

If all goes well, you are done! However with computers, everything doesn’t run so smoothly all of the time. In my particular instance one of my calendars was somehow corrupt enough to not make the move to the cloud, but I could still access it on my desktop. I kept getting errors in the upgrade process until I deleted the calendar from my desktop. After the upgrade was complete, I then imported the .ics file I backed up earlier manually. It work, but if it hadn’t, I was going to use Time Machine to restore a version that wasn’t corrupt and then I’d again move it to MobileMe manually.

I was a big user of BusySync and BusySync has specific instructions and caveats on how to make the move with their software. As for other secondary services, I’m disappointed that syncing with Google became more complex after the upgrade. I had to manually add my Google shared calendars.

Once the upgrade is complete, the way others subscribe to your calendar has changed. They now can have both read as well as write access to your calendars and most likely you’ll manually have to invite them to your calendar by using the Share command under the Calendar Menu within iCal. I had to manually re-invite people.

Another snag I personally ran into was on my MacBook, when I first launched iCal, it kept all the old calendars and then MobileMe created the proper CalDAV settings automatically but kept those old local calendars so everything was duplicated.

Two great websites to help ease the transition are here and here. If you ran into any snags or have any suggestions about upgrading your MobileMe calander, be sure to let us know in the comments.

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BusyToDo, a new to-do app for iPhone, aims to bring the most obvious omission from MobileMe to subscribers of the cloud services package from Apple. It does this without much flair, and it has a fairly high asking price. So is it worth it?

Much could be improved with MobileMe, starting with a free version, but Apple’s cloud service does wirelessly sync personal info like bookmarks, contacts, and appointments, but frustratingly not tasks. To fill that gap, there are apps like OmniGroup’s OmniFocus, but it’s both more powerful and more expensive ($19.99) than most people need. Appigo’s ToDo app is also feature-rich, and at $0.99, it’s a bargain, and even syncs wirelessly over a local network.

The downside of apps like Appigo’s ToDo is that they usually require companion server apps running on your Mac, as well some user intervention when syncing wirelessly. Also, the recent upgrade to online calendars for MobileMe users caused havoc with ToDo for me. All my tasks were stripped from their respective calendars, and while there’s a workaround, it’s still frustrating.

BusyToDo from BusyMac, the makers of the iCal-on-steroids app BusyCal, provides the syncing that Apple should have included natively. It’s a spartan to-do list with few of the advanced features of task apps like those from OmniGroup or Appigo, but BusyToDo is still missing a few basic features, too, like a badge on the icon indicating due tasks. There isn’t a native version yet for the iPad, either. What you see in the screenshot is what you get, though if you use BusyCal in combination with BusyToDo, you can get a little more, like repeat to-dos and tags.

Task can be shown or hidden by associated calendar, and the list can be sorted by due date, priority, calendar, or alphabetically. I prefer to sort by calendar, but since calendars are shown alphabetically, I used “00″ as a calendar for today or priority tasks. As can be seen in the screenshot, you can’t hide tasks that fall outside a timeframe like you can in iCal.

Again, as the settings illustrate (not shown is a slider switch to display alarms as local notifications), BusyToDo is a basic task list. At $4.99, such a simple to-do app would be way overpriced, except for its singular “killer” feature.

BusyToDo syncs iCal or BusyCal tasks through MobileMe, which is also the only way to sync with BusyToDo, but then that’s the point. Having logged in once to MobileMe, I created tasks and calendars on my MacBook, iPad, and iPhone, and they were instantly pushed to the other devices. There were no problems, no additional software or services were required, and BusyToDo worked over Wi-Fi and 3G.

It’s not fancy, and it’s not exactly cheap, but it works, and until Apple introduces its own solution, BusyToDo is your best bet for syncing MobileMe to-do tasks quickly and easily over-the-air.

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The Xmarks developers offer alternatives, but the only one they can suggest for Safari users is Apple’s  MobileMe service. As MobileMe costs $99 a year, subscribing just for the sake of syncing your Safari bookmarks is a bit costly. If you use any other browser, there are free alternatives such as Firefox Sync and Chrome Sync.

I’ve seen some weird and wacky ways of syncing Safari bookmarks, including emailing yourself every time you change your bookmarks, or simply “remember which bookmarks you’ve added and add them on the other machine(s),” neither of which are helpful. I’ve discovered a much more useful method involving Dropbox. It’s not as automatic as Xmarks was, but it gets the job done.

There are two ways of doing this: one uses a free download called SymbolicLinker, and the other uses Terminal.app. I’ll start by going through the steps for using SymbolicLinker, then I’ll talk about the Terminal method.

Using SymbolicLinker

1. Download SymbolicLinker. It can be found on MacUpdate. It’s not an application, but a Service you can install, which adds a new option when you right-click an item in the Finder. To install it, simply double-click the SymbolicLinker.service icon.
2. Get Dropbox. You can sign up for free. A free Dropbox account gives you 2GB of space. Obviously you can skip this step if you already have Dropbox.
3. Quit Safari. Safari will get confused if you start messing around with its files while it’s still running.
4. Create a ‘Bookmarks’ folder in Dropbox. It doesn’t matter what you call it, as long as you remember that it’s for your bookmarks.
5. Move the Bookmarks file from Safari to Dropbox. The file is called Bookmarks.plist and is located in [your Home folder]>Library>Safari. Make sure you move it rather than copy it over.
6. Create a symbolic link to the Bookmarks file. To do this, right-click Bookmarks.plist and choose Make Symbolic Link, which is the new option added by SymbolicLinker. Now drag the new file, ‘Bookmarks.plist symlink’, back to where you found the original file. Rename it back to ‘Bookmarks.plist’.

You can now re-open Safari to check that all your bookmarks are still there and that they work properly. Next, repeat these steps on the other computers you want to keep in sync:

1. Download and install SymbolicLinker. Do this exactly the same way as before.
2. Sync the computer with Dropbox. Make sure the new Bookmarks.plist file is completely downloaded before continuing.
3. Quit Safari.
4. Create a symbolic link to the Bookmarks.plist file in Dropbox. Delete the Bookmarks.plist file in Library>Safari and replace it with the symbolic link, again renaming it to simply ‘Bookmarks.plist’.
5. Reopen Safari and check it works. It should work first time, but if it doesn’t, retry the steps, and make sure Bookmarks.plist has a capital ‘B’.

The Terminal Method

Using Terminal (Applications>Utilities>Terminal) achieves exactly the same thing, using the same method, but just doesn’t involve any downloads. For this example, I’m going to put the Bookmarks file into Dropbox>Safari, but it works for any folder. Just switch out the file paths in the Terminal.

1. Create your folder in Dropbox. Again, doesn’t matter what you call it.
2. Move the Bookmarks file into Dropbox. Once again, you need to make sure that you’re moving the file and not copying it, otherwise you get an error saying that the file already exists.
3. Navigate to the Safari folder using Terminal. This can be done by typing (or copying and pasting):

cd ~/Library/Safari

4. Create the symbolic link. Do this by entering the following into Terminal:

ln -s ~/Dropbox/Safari/Bookmarks.plist Bookmarks.plist

5. Restart Safari.

The Problem

Unfortunately, the problem with changing the Bookmarks.plist directly is you have to quit and reopen Safari in order to update the bookmarks on each machine. It’s still definitely a lot easier than remembering the bookmarks you’ve got and adding them to your other machines manually. Also, it doesn’t cost $99 a year.

I’m sure that there are a whole bunch of other methods, perhaps using Automator or maybe another service similar to Xmarks, which accomplish the same task. If you know about any of those, please share below.

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One user and developer decided not to wait for Apple to implement the feature, and instead created his own iPhone app in order to solve the problem. Greg Hughes, the man in question, created a Wi-Fi syncing app that works with a companion desktop client to sync your iTunes library with your iPhone, iPod touch or even your iPad. Check out the video below to see it in action.

It may sound like something that shouldn’t even be possible using Apple’s closed playground of development APIs, and maybe Hughes is stepping slightly out of bounds, but the YouTube video showing the app in action proves that it does indeed work. Just because it works, though, doesn’t mean we’ll be seeing it available for purchase in the app store anytime soon. I think it’s pretty safe to say Apple won’t let this one ever see the light of day. It’ll probably play the old “feature duplication” card because it may or may not introduce this feature itself somewhere down the road.

It’s a shame because the implementation looks fantastic, and users wouldn’t even have to wait for a new iPhone OS iteration to get it, since it works with iPhone OS 3.X. Judging by the video, the app somehow tricks iTunes into thinking that an iPhone is mounted and then syncs any video and music with that device, so you wouldn’t get the full iPhone sync experience, but it would work perfectly for users like me who are also MobileMe subscribers, since we basically only plug in to update music anyway.

Hughes is doing one thing right: He’s promoting the heck out of the app before it even has a chance to run afoul of Apple’s review process. It worked for Opera Mini, although the organization behind that app has far more visibility and clout than does a single unknown developer acting on his own. Still, even if Apple does block the app, at least people will know it happened and possibly voice their disappointment, rather than just let it pass unnoticed.

We’ll probably see the Wi-Fi Sync app grace the halls of the jailbreak app stores even if Apple never lets it see the light of day through official channels, proving once again that no matter what improvements Apple makes to its software, there’s still always a reason to go rogue. Is Wi-Fi Sync enough justification for you?

The problem, though, is that syncing is not backing up.

Syncing’s main focus is making sure your data is accessible and identical at multiple locations. If you have a disaster at one of these locations, a syncing service will make sure you still have access to your stuff. That’s handy and is seen by people as a way of backing up. Lose your iPhone and your contacts are accessible via the web. Sync to Dropbox and if your MacBook hard drive dies, you can access your synced files via the web or another computer.

Unfortunately, syncing operates under the age-old computer principle of Garbage In Garbage Out. When syncing is working properly, a change made on one device is propagated to the web and to all other devices. If that change was unintended, the service might have a previous revision, but don’t count on it. A problem with data on one device is copied to all other devices in your sync scheme.

When it’s not working properly, stand back because things get ugly. I was a recent victim of this. I’ll be polite and won’t mention the name of the service, but it wasn’t a “sweet” experience. Somehow this company’s database was corrupt for my account and instead of syncing changes I made on my Mac to my PC, the server decided I had deleted a critical folder. I literally watched as the software started deleting folders from my Mac without warning or confirmation. I immediately unplugged my Internet connection to minimize the damage. While only the fates of the cloud know what really happened, the post-mortem analysis I had with their engineers indicated my PC’s sync database somehow “thought” I no longer had a folder on my hard drive and then told the cloud to delete it from other computers. Blame it on a PC to mess up a Mac. Of course, their server didn’t have a backup. A two-fisted punch right to the gut.

These same concerns also hold true for your calendars and contacts from MobileMe. Even though you sync them to the cloud, you should still perform a local backup of your Address Book and iCal. Don’t be lulled by the siren of the cloud assuring you that your data is safe. The cloud is a jealous mistress who can swipe data right from your hard drive. Being old school, I don’t fully trust syncing or the cloud and so I fully backup my hard drive via Time Machine and dedicated online backup services. While my sour experience was annoying, I was able to quickly recover.

Others have not been so lucky. Account and database corruption are a fact of computing and because syncing doesn’t only copy data, but remove it, it’s not a backup solution. A true backup solution cannot remove data from your drive, only copy it. Whenever I read backup software reviews, commenters ask why synchronization services aren’t mentioned. Now you know why.

Don’t rely on services like MobileMe and Dropbox as a backup. Your data will thank you.

Before I say anything else, it’s my duty to report that Apple is indeed acting within the scope of the agreement it has with developers in requesting the removal of this feature from apps. As of now, USB syncing is still a private API, which means developers shouldn’t technically be using it. To get around this, many have implemented the feature using the iPhone’s Digital Camera Image Management folder, but that also requires the use of private APIs.

Whether or not developers are violating the development agreement isn’t at issue here, though, really. Apple has quietly acquiesced to the use of USB syncing in many apps, not just Stanza, until now. The timing is not inauspicious. Apple’s only begun to enforce this rule following the unveiling of the iPad, and, more to the point, of the iBookstore.

Ars Technica believes this is only a temporary measure. They point to an alternative apparently in the works in iPhone 3.2:

Though users of Stanza, PDF readers, numerous audio editors and sequencers, and other apps will be frustrated, the good news is that Apple has a mechanism planned to address both syncing and file sharing issues. The beta SDK for iPhone OS 3.2 has APIs for accessing an on-device shared storage folder, which will be mounted as a readable and writable disk when plugged in to a computer via USB.

Ars then goes on to point out that iPhone OS 3.2 is currently only intended for use with the iPad. The same features could later appear in an update for the iPhone, but they may not. We could see an OS forking at this point, and that might mean a significant difference in the available features for each device.

Not to mention that there’s no guarantee the iPhone or the iPad will ever get the same kind of USB syncing functionality back. The iBookstore means that Apple has a monetary reason to prevent other content providers from getting its e-book products onto its devices. And in the meantime, while everyone waits for a potential future solution, Stanza users and others are left completely out in the cold.

The iPad represents many new possibilities for iPhone developers, but at what cost? Will Apple close its iPhone OS platform even further to ensure that it maintains the lion’s share of content control? Will it quietly hamstring legitimate competitors as it extends its power over the media users view on its devices? Not necessarily, but with the advent of a brand new device, we should watch closely to make sure we aren’t losing something irreplaceable in the bargain.

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