The fun of updating to iOS 5...

October 12th today. D-Day for Mac freaks and alike. I've been watching the blogs all day for the latest on the 5.0 release and find out out when it was supposed to be made available to the Public. Ars Technica was the first to fire a false news flash that pushed our systolic to the highest tens. Eventually it all proved a pile of fresh BS of the finest kind. Once you did like they said you were indeed guided to create your iCloud account but soon you realized that unless you were a genuine and registered 'Developer' you were kinda short of luck. Anyways, I had to wait for some extra hours before anything was possible.

For fun I keep a OS 'Developer' account and so I decided to try my luck via that channel. Initially, no deal whatsoever. I mean, you need to realize, this time it's not just an iOS device update... it's the whole bleeding universe of Apple apps and OS's that need upgrading, incl. iPhoto, iTunes and iWork apps. So, I started with Lion. As a 'Developer' I found the latest Lion version 10.7.2 that is supposed to be the iCloud version. Indeed, after installing, I discovered the iCloud icon in the Preferences and went to set it up. Now what happened next only His Jobness in Heaven knows. I know that I finally managed to move my me.com account to iCloud in just a few seconds, and lost quite a few things in the process (like galleries, etc) and I'll be damned if I knew how to get into my iDisk again, if at all. I know I said somewhere that I needed to maintain it, but who knows. In all my excitement I might have screwed it up.

In the meantime, His Jobness called upon his servant Tim and they both opened the gates of Paradise (no apples left there, Eva ate them all) and iPhone updates were sent to all of us mortals. I just finished (sort of) my iPhone's update, as we speak. So far so good, other that you need to set it up from scratch again (at least that's what you think in the beginning until it asks you for a restore (iCloud or iTunes). But it's cool because it reacts like it doesn't need iTunes or a PC/Mac Connection to be set up (exactly like they announced it). It might intimidate a few Internet immigrants in the beginning (folks of my generation) with all these steps you need to take to get it back in shape, like you left it before the update. This update is pretty big, trust me. 774.4MB were downloaded in iTunes to do that, and I was lucky to get it in just a few minutes with download speeds up to 4MB a sec, until it hit 670MB. Then it slowed down from a superhero to a geriatric turtle level.

Well, bad news. The iPhone was moved to iOS 5 but it failed to restore from my backups. I'll spend the rest of the evening finding out how to do that. If anybody knows how, call me. Pleeeeease!

I'll be damned. Being all in the dark, with my eyes covered with a black cloth and seeing the blackest of blacks all over, I told the iPhone to back-up everything to iCloud instead of to iTunes locally. All of a sudden, all the apps I had on my last version of the previous iOS (4.3.something) and some more (trust me) appeared to be getting to my phone out of nowhere. Bless His Jobness. Hardly buried and already doing miracles to be canonized! I just can't believe how these Apple folks write software. This ain't software! This is sheer magic! Good for any idiot like me and worse, to lead us thru the intricacies of technology innovation of the finest kind. What will eventually happen to this phone once all updates are done only His Almighty Saint Steven knows. Let's all pray together, brothers and sisters!

UPDATE: One of the 'funniest' things I discovered is the non-destructibility of the Photo Stream. You shoot a pic and it's all over your devices, unable to hide or kill. So folks, you are warned. No compromising shooting with iPhones and other iDevices under iOS 5 until the comedians who set this up decide to add a delete button somewhere. It's so hilarious! I'm sure we're gonna have an update real soon. Right now, I can't hold my laughs on this. And no, things don't get worse because of the passing of Steven Paul. It's just one of these things...