When MobileMe was a paid service the only content that was automatically stored on your MobileMe account was your email, calendar, Safari bookmarks and notes.  If you wanted to use your MobileMe space to also host your family photos and videos, you had to manually do so by electing to share your content from within iPhoto, iMovie or even iWeb.

But things have changed now that the transition from MobileMe to iCloud is now complete. People who have recently switched will notice that there is now even more data that is automatically stored in your iCloud account than to its predecessor.  Your iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch can easily be set up to automatically store all of your app’s data files and your individual device backups in addition to your email, calendar, Safari bookmarks and notes.

With OS X Mountain Lion, your Mac will also by default start storing your documents in your iCloud account — this allows your files and app data to be shared across all of your devices.  With the enhancements that Apple has made with Galleries on both the OS X and iOS versions of iPhoto, you can once again host your family photos using your iCloud storage.  And as photo resolutions keep getting larger, as well as the resolution of the devices that display them, the question that remains is 5GB — the free entry-level storage size for iCloud — is enough space for an individual to use?

On Macs with Mountain Lion you have the ability to decide on an individual basis what files will and will not be stored on iCloud.  This level of control however has not been extended to iOS, as its only configuration is an “all-in” or “all-out” when it comes to the ability for apps to store their data on iCloud.  Some third-party apps on iOS will let you choose between iCloud and other cloud based storage solutions like DropBox.  With the Apple’s own apps in particular, you will find that you are storing more information via your iCloud account than you have in the past.

If you manage your backups wisely, and don’t store too many files on your Mac to your iCloud account, 5GB can successfully manage two iOS devices and a Mac.  If on the other hand you rely upon iCloud backups for all of your devices, and depend on your photos being backed up to your iCloud account, and you have been opting to store more and more files from your Mac on your iCloud account, then 5GB will not get you very far.

Fortunately your Photo Stream, comprised of your most recent 1,000 photos, which only stick around for 30 days, does not count against your iCloud space quota.  This also includes the additional Shared Photo Streams that you create for sharing with your family and friends:  They too do not count against your iCloud storage quota.

But what takes up the most space on your iCloud storage will be your iOS device backups.  This is primarily due to the fact that iOS will by default backup your entire Camera Roll to your iCloud storage.  You can however take control of what apps do and what apps do not get backed up by performing the following steps:

• In your iOS Settings, tap on iCloud and select “Storage and Backup”.
• If your iCloud Backup setting is turned on for that device, tap on “Manage Storage”.
• Select the backup file for the device you are currently using.
• Selectively turn on and off which apps data you want to back up the next time you perform a backup.

All iCloud storage is shared across all of your devices, iOS and OS X alike.  If you still find that’s not enough space for you, here is how you can check on how much space your stuff is taking up:

• On OS X, goto System Preferences and select your iCloud preferences.
• Click on the “Manage” button in the bottom right hand corner to see a list of apps that are storing data on your iCloud account.
• On iOS, goto the Setting app and select your iCloud settings.
• Click on the “Storage & Backup” selection, then click on the “Manage Storage” option to see a list of apps that are storing data on your iCloud account.

If you discover, as I have, that 5GB of storage space on iCloud is not enough, you can opt to purchase more.  And for the same price as an individual MobileMe subscription, you can get up to 55GB of space for that same $99 per yr.  I only hope that 55GB will be enough space for my iCloud needs by this time next year.

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But something was clearly in the works – Earlybird’s recent purchase of HTGF’s stake was largely intended to ensure future investment, and it came with talk of 6Wunderkinder taking a heads-down approach. So I spoke to CEO Christian Reber to find out what’s happening with the company’s two products – as it turned out, he had some interesting opinions to share about Windows 8, too.

Meyer: You’re pretty much in between major releases of Wunderlist, right?
Reber: Yeah, you’re totally right. We launched Wunderlist 18 months ago and it’s going great – 2.5 million users, more than 5.5 million downloads, 100 million tasks created. And we launched Wunderkit in February as a beta product. We’re analysing it, testing new features, improving improving improving – but right now we’re working on the evolution of Wunderlist.

Is Wunderkit actually an active avenue for you, or is it more experimental?
It’s totally experimental, totally numbers-driven – if we see something works, we work on it. For Wunderlist we haven’t pushed out updates for eight months on some platforms. With the new release, Wunderlist will be able to talk with Wunderkit.

During creating Wunderkit, we realised a startup should be careful of doing two products at the same time, which is why we merged them somehow, at least technically.

You’ve not given numbers for Wunderkit’s adoption yet. Is the platform still growing?
It is growing – it has hundreds of thousands of users. It’s not a product that doesn’t work. We built the product in order to see if this is the future of our company, and does it meet our vision. We launched it and knew really quickly we had to improve something because it was not growing as fast as Wunderlist.

We made decisions in terms of how we continue with it, but overall in terms of strategy we can’t talk about it too much, because the productivity market is crazily active right now. You see a lot of products that adopt features or design ideas from Wunderkit, so it can’t be wrong [laughs].

Is Wunderlist just an easier proposition for people? How would you characterise the difference between the two?
Right now Wunderlist is the easier product. Wunderkit is maybe a niche product – it’s smaller than Wunderlist. The model I have in my head is that Wunderlist is task management for consumers, and Wunderkit is more project management for consumers. The question is, what do you have more of? More tasks or more projects?

More tasks, I’d imagine.
[Nods] We have a vision and I definitely want to build up a company that’s able to build more than one product. If we see something isn’t working… I mean, Apple did the same [with] MobileMe and iCloud. If you want to be successful, disrupt yourself.

What are your thoughts on the productivity app scene in general?
It’s a very interesting market. At first nobody believed in it – for us fundraising was super-hard because social was the big thing. Now it’s crazy, with Evernote and Dropbox. The space is getting more and more interesting – that’s why I stopped talking too much about strategy. It was interesting that Podio did an exit [sold to Citrix for $53m]. That was an interesting milestone for them.

I know you’d prefer not to talk strategy, but what will Wunderlist’s evolution bring?
Without going too deep into features, we want to continue going in the direction we came from. It was never a geeky product, it was never made for teams to organise or anything. It was made for consumers, for mothers. We built a product for the eight-year-old kid in school organising his homework, but also the fifty-year-old organising his company. Many task managers focus on one direction, such as team organisation. That’s where we let the product evolve. There will be new features that have never been implemented in a task manager before, and even to move away from the task manager thing… I can’t talk too much about the features now…

With a task manager, how most people use it is they put stuff in, and if they don’t have anything to do, they open it and look. For us the biggest focus is making it a product people can’t live without. If someone else completes a task, you want to know.

So it’s going to become social?
Maybe a little [laughs]. I wouldn’t say we’re going into a typical social product, but if there’s a feature that’s smartly integrated and is kind of social, you could say that.

We’re currently building a Wunderlist app for Windows 8 Metro. We won’t relaunch Wunderlist on every platform at the same time, because it’s too crazy, too much work. We will focus on Windows, Mac, iOS, Android and the web. Windows Phone will follow, but not as part of the initial launch.

Have you been working with Microsoft on that?
Everyone knows Microsoft wants every developer to build product for their platform. My personal opinion about Metro – OK, we came from Windows development and went to Mac. If Microsoft does it right, they can definitely have a huge impact on the cross-platform market. The question is, are they doing it right? It’s HTML5 so it’s a good technology, it’s a good interface, but I have my concerns.

What concerns in particular?
It’s more about how Microsoft approaches this concept. You have to build two different apps, for the normal Windows platform and for Metro. We had huge problems creating our app for Windows 8 – we had to stop because we had problems doing it. The tech wasn’t ready.

At what point was that?
Four to five months ago. The problems are fixed now, but if you take a look at the [Metro] interface, not everyone will like it. If it was my project I’d stop it, tell the designers to think one more time about the interface, and find a solution that everyone loves. But we support it at least. Microsoft is smart – they have the right people to market it and launch it.

6wunderkinder has been around for a couple of years now. Are you finding the Berlin scene’s getting even more active these days?
I’m definitely seeing more companies evolving. A year ago I’d have said it’s amazing, et cetera, but right now the scene is realising it should maybe do less hype and focus on building serious businesses that make money and really are relevant globally. Hype is great but it’s not sustainable. The scene is doing a strategy shift in terms of professionalising. Many founders are hidden now, focusing on their businesses 24/7.

And in the long term, are you looking for an exit or IPO?
Every startup entrepreneur who doesn’t think a single time about an exit is probably naïve. But I’m definitely not thinking about an exit right now. IPO is the goal, definitely.

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If you have an older MobileMe account, you may have held off on the transition to iCloud until the very end. It can feel like a significant move, especially if you hold a .Mac or original iTools account, from when Apple first started offering web-based services in 2002 and 2000, respectively. Apple has offered various cloud-based services, like iDisk, Domain Hosting, Web Galleries and several other Sync Services, over the years, but none of these will work with iCloud moving forward.

Last year when Apple announced the end of MobileMe and the beginning of iCloud, I knew exactly when I would transition at least one of my accounts: the week prior to the June 30, 2012 cutoff date. And that final week officially begins on Saturday. For those that have justified putting this off until now, here are some tips tailored for you.

Email access from older devices

It is not easy to switch your primary email account.  You have friends, family, co-workers, businesses and various online accounts that all need to be informed of the change.  And when it comes to mail in iCloud, not every Apple device that you might own can run the software necessary to support iCloud. iCloud requires OS X 10.7 Lion on Mac and iOS 5 on iPhone and iPad.  That means that there is quite a long list of older Apple hardware that will not be able to access the migrated mail accounts.  That could have left many long time Apple users with a tough choice: Upgrade their hardware, or try and inform the world that they have a new email address.

Fortunately, as of May 1, Apple has added a new transition option for MobileMe users that will allow you to access your mail from older devices that cannot support the software necessary to run iCloud.  By holding off on the full transition to iCloud a little while longer, you can keep your MobileMe or .Mac mail account up and running.  But this is for mail only.  This is not a complete continuation of all of the MobileMe services.  It is only a means of preserving access to your mail account from older Apple devices beyond the June 30 deadline.  All other MobileMe services will be shut down on June 30 as planned.

However, keeping your existing email setup will not happen automatically for you.  You still need to go through Apple’s transition process.  When you start the process, you will need to select “Not all my devices meet requirements.”  As you then go through the process, you will be told that you will be able to keep access to your MobileMe and .Mac mail accounts.  At any time, you can continue the transition and create a new iCloud account using your MobileMe mail ID.

Export Address Book, iCal and Safari bookmarks

During the MobileMe to iCloud migration, your Contacts and Bookmarks will not be migrated for you.  Instead, the first device you connect to your newly created iCloud account following the migration will be used to upload an initial copy of this information.

So it is important that you have backup copies of your important information in addition to your regular Time Capsule and various online backup solutions.  This will decrease your recovery time from hours to minutes.

Thankfully, Apple has made it very easy to archive your contacts, bookmarks and calendar data.  In Address Book, Safari and iCal, from each app’s File menu, you can select the Export menu item to create an Address Book Archive, a Bookmarks HTML file and an iCal Archive.  Each of these three files can very quickly be imported back into their respective apps if ever something goes wrong during the transition process.

Sync MobileMe iDisk locally

After June 30, the iDisk service will no longer be supported by Apple, and you will likely have no way to access any information you have stored in iDisk.  The easiest way to preserve your MobileMe iDisk is to sync it locally.  From within MobileMe System Preferences, click on the iDisk tab and start the iDisk Sync service.

What this does is create a mountable disk image or sparse bundle in your ~/Library/FileSync folder.  It is a local copy of all of your iDisk files.  Any changes you make to your iDisk will be reflected in this local copy.  Syncing will prove to be much more successful than trying to manually copy your iDisk files by dragging and dropping folders everywhere.  It may take a while to fully sync all of your files depending on how many files you have stored in iDisk.  Once the sync process is complete, and you are ready to migrate to iCloud, you can stop the iDisk Sync service.  This will create a copy of the disk image on your desktop in a folder beginning with the name “Previous local iDisks.”  The file contained in this folder is something like a zipped up archive of all of your files.  By double clicking on the file, you mount the image as a disk that you can access via the Finder. This disk image is something that you can continue to mount as a drive even after the MobileMe iDisk service is shut down.

Download archived MobileMe Galleries

With iCloud’s new Photo Stream replacing MobileMe Galleries, you will need to download all photos prior to June 30.  Perhaps the easiest way to preserve your MobileMe galleries is by logging on to the MobileMe web site, go to your Gallery and click on the “Download Albums” link in the top left corner of the page.

This will create an archive backup or zip file of each Photo Album in your MobileMe gallery.  The files will be saved to Safari’s Downloads location.

Migrate to a new domain hosting site

Perhaps one of the most difficult things to do will be to migrate your MobileMe hosted web site over to another hosting provider.  The difficulty here lies in selecting a new hosting provider.  Most of the heavy lifting will be done with whomever you use as your domain registrar.  That is where you will change your CNAME entry from web.me.com to whatever your new hosting provider specifies.  All of your web site’s content should be managed within your selected web authoring tool of choice.  So hopefully you have another copy of your most recent upload stored locally.

Once you have transitioned over to your new hosting provider, log back into your MobileMe account and on the Account page, click Personal Domain on the left.  From here, click the Remove Domain button on the right to remove your configured personal domain from MobileMe.

Overall, the process of transitioning is straightforward and quite simple.  If you have a lot of mail, files and photos, the process could take a while to complete.  I migrated most of my MobileMe family accounts last year when the transition was first announced.  The only hold ups I had were that one of primary users of the account was still using older Apple hardware that doesn’t meet the minimum requirements to support iCloud, and I had an account that I was using to host a web site on MobileMe.  Hopefully the transition will go as smoothly for you as it did for me.

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A German startup called fruux takes the cross-platform approach, and over the last 15 months it’s picked up almost 100,000 users who want to sync without being tied to a single platform. And now that it’s also acquired a chunk of seed funding, the company’s planning to make a second version that’s more collaboration-friendly.

The original service lets people store their contacts, calendar entries and to-do lists in the cloud and synchronize them with iOS and Android mobile devices, Mac OS X systems and the open-source Thunderbird and Evolution mail clients.

CEO Dominik Tobschall told me on Wednesday that quite a few teams have already been using fruux to run pooled contact lists and calendars — a pretty kludgy way of doing things considering that it’s a service built for one, but apparently it’s good enough for some small agencies and architects.

Now the company has some extra funding (Tobschall won’t say how much, beyond the fact that it’s six figures), it hopes to have that team-friendly second app on the market by the end of 2012.

“Our biggest competitor might be iCloud, but that doesn’t help you if you have more than one user,” Tobschall said. “We’re going more the Dropbox route -– our aim is avoiding vendor lock-in and making it platform-independent, and we hope to offer our first team features within this year.”

Other plans include the addition of developer APIs and integration with more third-party services – fruux uses open standards such as CardDAV and CalDAV.

The funding came from High-Tech Gründerfonds (HTGF), which has also put money into the likes of Ezeep and 6wunderkinder, and netSTART Venture.

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The move is the result of a permanent ban Motorolawon on the feature earlier this month. Although it almost goes without saying, the tussle is all to do with patents, and the ban on push mail constitutes just one facet of the sprawling, all-out war between Apple, Android and a good chunk of the wider mobile industry.

According to Apple:

“Due to recent patent litigation by Motorola Mobility, iCloud and MobileMe users are currently unable to have iCloud and MobileMe email pushed to their iOS devices while located within the borders of Germany.”

The patent in question covers a “multiple pager status synchronization system and method”, which turns out to be pretty essential for offering push mail. The ban doesn’t mean that iCloud and MobileMe aren’t working in Germany – it just means the services can’t use that one feature. That’s why iOS users there have to set their iPhones and iPads to do mail-pulls at timed intervals, or (shudder) check their mail manually.

And for those reading this in the U.S. and chuckling, I wouldn’t get too comfy if I were you. Motorola launched a similar suit in Florida in January, accusing Apple of infringing on the U.S. equivalent of the same patent.

However, the permanent ban on iCloud and MobileMe push mail in Germany shouldn’t be confused – although confusion is more than understandable – with the temporary injunction Motorola won at the same time against certain models of iPhone and iPad. That was a temporary injunction that only resulted in the devices being taken off sale for a couple of hours, and was to do with a standards-essential 3G patent, rather than a push mail one.

The 3G patent stuff may backfire on Motorola. Standards-essential patents are supposed to be licensed out on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory (FRAND) terms, but Motorola – and its almost-owner Google – reckon 2.25 percent of the entire device’s sale price is a fair deal. Apple disagrees, and has fired off a complaint to Europe’s antitrust authorities about the issue.

But that will have to be dealt with in the future. For now, Apple’s German customers are really feeling  the pain of the patent wars for the first time. However, it may work out for Apple in getting users to take up iCloud, which is largely a replacement for MobileMe.

Until its appeal gets accepted or rejected, Apple is offering two slightly different solutions for its iOS users in Germany. iCloud users get the easier deal, as the service will switch back to push as soon as the user leaves Germany. MobileMe users just lose push forever as soon as they check their mail in Germany, and Apple recommends switching to iCloud instead – which was kind of what they were pushing for anyway.

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Patent blog FOSS Patents says the two actions are unrelated, and that Apple removing some older products comes because Motorola moved to enforce an important patent victory it won back in December. It was then that a judge ruled that Motorola had a patent on a ”method for performing a countdown function during a mobile-originated transfer for a packet radio system.”

The result is that only older devices like the iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4 and 3G iPads were removed. Why not the iPhone 4S? It could be because the iPhone 4S has a chip from Qualcomm. The affected models have Infineon chips. Qualcomm chips could be safe for Apple in this case, according to FOSS Patents, if we assume “that Motorola and Qualcomm have a cross-license agreement in place (just like Samsung and Qualcomm do)” which would mean that “Apple is covered by extension, as a result of what is called patent exhaustion (a patent owner gets paid only once for the same use of a patent in a product).”

Perhaps more worrisome for some Apple customers who own the iPhone 4S in Germany right now is an injunction that affects iCloud users who want push notifications on their phones. The ruling affects any Apple devices that can receive push email notifications from iCloud or the earlier version, MobileMe. While neither service will get shut down as a result of the ruling, Apple will likely have to come up with a workaround for its iCloud/MobileMe customers there.

Apple won’t be letting this one go. As a company representative told PaidContent in a bit of subtle snarkiness on Friday, “Apple believes this old pager patent is invalid and we’re appealing the court’s decision.”

Update: It looks like the same German court may have suspended the injunction on the older 3G iPhones and iPads and they will be on sale again in “a matter of hours.” Apple told AllThingsD just now: “All iPad and iPhone models will be back on sale through Apple’s online store in Germany shortly. Apple appealed this ruling because Motorola repeatedly refuses to license this patent to Apple on reasonable terms, despite having declared it an industry standard patent seven years ago.”

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The program has three major components: Calendar Cleaner, Contacts Cleaner and Sync Tune-Up. If you want just one of the components, you can purchase the first two separately at the Mac App Store. However it’s likely you’ll need all three so I recommend the buying the full package.

Contacts Cleaner looks for issues that could cause errors such as invalid characters, malformed phone numbers as well as duplicate information. What I like about this program is that it not only finds the errors, but tells you why it thinks they represent a problem. For example, I’d often put “husband and wife” in the First Name field, but Contacts Cleaner warns me “This contact has a space in the first name. In some cases these names can become transposed after syncing with Google.” Sure enough when I went into Google, I noticed that problem.

Calendar Cleaner does similar checks for errors that can occur with your various sync destinations. My calendar was fraught with malformed recurring events that wouldn’t sync, and a pass by Calendar Cleaner fixed those in no time.

Both programs give you the option of opening the item within Address Book or iCal in order to make sure you know what kind of change is being made before you authorize it. Apple’s Address Book application looks for merged items itself, but doesn’t give you options to control what is merged. iCal users have no built-in options to search for duplicates and merge events.

Finally, Sync Tune-Up (only available as part of the bundle) gives you a front end for more fine-grained control over fixing your sync-related issues, such as de-registering individual devices and software, or the “nuclear” option which rebuilds the entire sync database. If your sync is taking extra long or you’ve made a bunch of changes with your devices or accounts, a nice reset can do you a world of good. A good indication of problems can be found by looking at your console logs and looking for mentions of the “truth” and too much vacuuming.

The more you sync, the more likely it is that problems will occur. To prevent or repair these problems, Spanning Tools is a great option.

Disclosure: Spanning Tools provided a copy of the software for review purposes.

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Call it a personal cloud or a digital locker. People like keeping stuff online.

Four out of five people are aware of the terms “personal cloud” or “digital locker,” and only one in 10 didn’t have any idea what those services might be for, according to a survey from Funambol. However, those who are aware of the terms are also big users of the “Facebook cloud” (at 76 percent) and the “Google cloud” (at 75 percent). Essentially, the survey looked not at clouds as the title suggests, but measured how comfortable people are with keeping their data and files online.

It turns out most folks are very comfortable with doing this: Even when asked about more “pure-play” cloud services such as Dropbox, 47 percent of those asked were already using such services. Funambol, which provides white-label online storage services, asked 232 people from its email list a few questions about personal clouds (only 5 of those surveyed used the service). The respondents were mostly males in their 30s.

Three-quarters of those surveyed said they expected to use such digital lockers in the future, mostly so they could access their files, music and contacts across a variety of devices (89 percent cited that motivation). Seventy-one percent also thought that it made a nice backup, and 48 percent said it made it easier to share information. So it seems that people want access to their own media on all of their devices, don’t want to lose it when a hard drive dies and less than half are thinking about collaboration or sharing content. If the driving factor of cloud adoption in the enterprise is agility, for consumers it’s about convenience.

But consumers need to feel their data is both secure (75 percent cited this as a concern) and kept private, even though a mere 2 percent of folks surveyed said they won’t use the cloud because they were worried about privacy. For the most part, convenience was the biggest factor in cloud use, combined with a desire to get as much storage as possible for the cheapest amount: A little over two-thirds — at 67 percent — were willing to pay for their access to a digital locker, with the most popular price point being $5 per month. That prices assumes that a personal cloud account provided a sufficient amount of storage, with 50 GB being the most common example.

Rather than provide new insights with regard to personal clouds, the survey confirmed what many of us already know: that people want to store stuff online, for it to be kept secure and to not have to pay a lot for it. And this set of desires has only gained in urgency as people carry around smartphones and tablets that are also connected to the web and thus able to offer access to more content and applications.

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Find My Mac uses known Wi-Fi tower location databases to pinpoint a Mac’s whereabouts, as it doesn’t have access to cell tower triangulation and GPS technology the way an iPhone or 3G-capable iPad does. Still, it seems to still be fairly accurate, and it also provides users whose Macs have gone missing with the option of locking the screen with a four-digit PIN and erasing the contents of the hard drive remotely. Find My Mac also lets Mac owners play a sound through their Mac’s speakers, and display a message of their own creation on the device’s screen. Even if your Mac is off when you send these commands, they will take effect the next time it’s online.

Once Find My Mac is enabled on a user’s Mac, they can view its location on a map using iCloud.com, and also perform any of the actions listed above from the website. It’s very likely that Macs with the service enabled will also eventually show up in the Find My iPhone apps for iPhone and iPad, too, based on how it works in the browser.

Making Find My Mac a part of the free suite of iCloud services is a smart move by Apple. Because of its role as a data security and anti-theft measure, it should help draw even single-device Mac owners who aren’t interested in email and information syncing features to iCloud, and adoption is going to be crucial to the ultimate success of iCloud. Apple is likely hoping that iCloud will not only attract new users to the Mac and iOS platforms, but also keep them there. Having all your data, purchases, email and documents associated with an account designed to work best on Macs and exclusively on iOS devices should provide lots of motivation not to go looking at competitor products.

Business strategy aside, having the ability to remotely track and wipe your Mac, which is a much more expensive loss than an iPhone, and one that is probably more likely to hold sensitive info for most, is a great boon to Apple customers. Look for it to go live alongside the rest of iCloud this September.

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1. Remove icons from Launchpad. Right now, the only icons you can remove from Launchpad are apps installed via the Mac App Store. If you remove the icon, the whole app is removed. In a way, this makes sense: they want to transfer the same ease-of-deletion from iOS to OS X. The problem is, if you have a ton of what Lion sees as apps — in my case, all the old World of Warcraft patches showed up in Launchpad — you’re going to have a mess. I can’t hide the apps completely, so instead I performed the digital equivalent of stuffing them in the closet. I created a single folder, moved any non-app programs into that, and stuck it on the last page in Launchpad.

2. Reveal your Home Library folder. I’m not sure why Apple hid this, but there are two ways you can get to it. The first is to go to the Finder, open the Go menu, and choose “Go to Folder.” Type in ~/Library/ and hit Enter. This will bring you to the folder. If you need to get there more than occasionally, or have an app where the hidden flag is causing problems, you can make it visible by typing in “chflags nohidden ~/Library” in the Terminal.

3. Make an app open in all spaces. This tip only works if you have multiple Desktop spaces. To add a space in Mission Control move your pointer to the upper-right hand corner and click on the large Plus icon. Then, right-click on the apps’s icon in the Dock, choose Options, and “Assign to: All spaces.” As a bonus tip, you can also create an empty space to quickly flip to an empty display if you need to.

4. Remove icons from the Sidebar. I’ve run into a few instances where dragging an icon off the Sidebar doesn’t actually remove it. If this happens, right-click the wayward icon and choose “Remove from Sidebar.” If, like me, you ended up with some Sidebar folders pointing to now nonexistent folders and can’t remove them at all, renaming the com.apple.sidebarlists.plist file in ~\Library\Preferences folder (it doesn’t matter what you rename it to) and rebooting will restore your Sidebar to default icons.

5. MobileMe Calendar syncing is now set in iCal. This one threw me at first. In Snow Leopard, you set MobileMe Calendar syncing within the MobileMe System Preferences pane. Now, it’s under iCal’s preferences under Accounts. I imagine this is because iCloud will render the MobileMe preferences pane obsolete.

These are five quick tips I’ve found to help me ease into Lion. What tips do you folks have?

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