Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 6
Stay in Touch
So, your photos and movies are available on all your devices and are synced perfectly, but what about
the more functional parts of your digital life? The contacts you need to get in touch with friends, fam-
ily, and work colleagues? The e-mail and instant message conversations you want to keep going
wherever you are? That's what this chapter will cover as well as entertaining features of iCloud and iOS
such as using Location Services to find people and places and even connect to your computer at home.
It's tough to really understand just how useful it is to have all your contacts and e-mails in sync
until you are caught without a vital phone number or message at a crucial time. At that point, of
course, it's too late.
Check Your Connections
Before I delve into the ins and outs of editing and syncing contacts, you need to ensure that the
same iCloud syncing for music, movies, and photos is also happening with your contacts. As with
everything iCloud, a quick trip to the iCloud settings on all your devices should ensure that all works
well.
A quick way to test your contact and mail syncing is to make changes on one device and see if they
update in all your others. Any simple edit like deleting a Mail message or updating contact information
should be the way to go. These changes should then be sent to the iCloud servers and pushed down to
all your iCloud-connected devices in a matter of minutes, if not sooner — assuming the devices are
connected to the Internet, of course.
You can accelerate the process in an iOS device's Contacts app by going to the Groups section and
tapping the Refresh button ( ). In the Mail app on an iOS device, you can do the same by going to
you iCloud e-mail account's inbox and then dragging down from the top and then letting go.
If the changes don't appear on one or more of your devices, check that they are connected to the
Internet and signed in to the iCloud account you want to sync with.
Use Contacts with iCloud
It's often the case that an iCloud user creates an account and then finds duplicates or out-of-date
contacts in the Contacts app on his or her iCloud-connected devices. To avoid such confusion and dis-
organization, it may be worth cleaning out your contact list entirely — adding missing contacts, delet-
ing obsolete ones, and finding duplicates that you reconcile into one entry — and starting from scratch.
It's easiest to so on a computer where you can more accurately see the contacts being synced and
simply delete those you don't want.
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