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With Mountain Lion's iCloud Integration, Apple Strengthens the Garden Wall
snydeq writes "With WWDC around the corner, iOS 6 rumors are taking center stage, but the real action for developers may be around iCloud. Forthcoming OS X Mountain Lion will integrate iCloud into the formal file system, making iCloud usage much easier and thus more common, and thanks to iCloud Documents, which lets apps open and save documents directly in iCloud, developers will be able to better tap iOS-to-OSX document syncing in their apps, a la iWork. But there is a downside to this opportunity: 'For developers, it further enmeshes you in the Apple ecosystem, almost in the way that America Online did in its heyday. Case in point: OS X apps can use the iCloud Documents APIs only if they are sold through the Mac App Store.'"
I don't know y'all, feels more like Kudzu to me.....
Three Squirrels
This signals the beginning of the end for something.
the your documents on Google Docs or Office 365 (aside from the apps residing on the host CPU instead of a web app).
I'm a big Apple fan, but WTF Apple? Not cool.
Trolling is a art,
iNtheSlightest
That's what this is.
As a long time Apple user I can say that if things keep going this
way I WILL be looking elsewhere for my next computer purchases.
Any way you slice it, this is unethical. Restricting usage of an API to developers who sell through your platform (and thus give you 30%), giving your own private cloud service filesystem level integration... Imagine if Microsoft made either of these moves.
The point is that on Mac Apple is clearly going to pushing developers to use the App store, which is what is happening right now. The benefit to users is that the App will appear on all registered computers. The problem is that it is a walled garden. WIll developers have to use the API to store documents on iCloud? WHo knows? WHat I do know is that if it provides integration between iOS and Mac devices, there wil be little complaints.
What I also believe is that users are not going to be using the documents part of iCloud very much. It will quickly require payments to apple as the data grows. The real part of iCloud that streangths the garden wall is that content bought from apple is stored for free.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
With both Snow Leopard and Lion, I had to hack a file just to enabled TRIM on my Intel SSD. I have a feeling I'll have to do that again if I upgrade. Unless they've made attempts to correct that little "exploit".
Apple makes a good product, but only if you buy everything through Apple. I'm quite honestly surprised they even made replacing an HDD with a non-Apple brand even possible. I know some IBM Thinkpads will bitch at POST unless the drive's firmware has been signed by IBM.
Life is not for the lazy.
That wall keeps business out too. The problem with walls is that everything just grows around them and what's contained becomes irrelevant.
Apple doesn't want you to have a computer, they want you to have Apple devices where you buy stuff from Apple. They want you to sit around and consume the content they sell. They've been heading that direction for awhile now, this is just a continuation of it. It isn't likely to be too many more years before they lock it down entirely, and Macs are just large stations for accessing the Apple Store/iTunes.
Apple is all about the locked-in ecosystem where everything is their way, everything runs through them, and they get a cut of everything. This is just another step down that road.
They want it to Just Work. They want to buy it, plug it in, go pointy-clicky and have it work. People have an expectation that computers and technological devices (tablets, phones, etc) work without screwing around with them.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
But not this. They are providing a free network support service to vendors that sell through their store. Seems obvious, ethical, and fair. Dropbox is better and simpler anyway because all apps can use it with no API; however Dropbox SELLS its service and gives it away for free as a loss leader.
Isn't this pretty much exactly how Skydrive works, and isn't that being integrated into Windows 8? Nobody has been complaining about that...
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
Maybe my expectations aren't matched with it. I want to be able to drop ANY type of file into it. That doesn't seem to be the case.
to make computers as reliable and turn-key as a microwave, this is probably the only way to do it is to protect the lusers from themselves.
here is the bargain: give me your freedom and i'll keep you safe.
"Don't lay this on Tim Cook. This was Steve Jobs's plan; Tim is just carrying on with it."
It doesn't matter whose idea it was. It is still a bad idea. They are making exactly the same mistakes that Microsoft did, for the same reasons Microsoft made them, and from which Microsoft has not, to this day, recovered.
Cook or Jobs, either one should know better. I could see this coming from a mile away, and they have had plenty of warning. If Apple keeps this up, the results will not be good for them.
YOU are geeks / nerds / techies / whatever label you prefer. Apple does not even count you as part of their customer base.
Apple is selling the coolest tech for largest market segment. You buy an apple device and it JUST FUCKING WORKS out of the box. and like it or not that is what people want. They don't want to have to do what you love to do and they HATE doing.
They want a device that just does what they need to do, and like it or not apple devices do just that.
Hey KID! Yeah you, get the fuck off my lawn!
Any way you slice it, this is unethical. Restricting usage of an API to developers who sell through your platform (and thus give you 30%), giving your own private cloud service filesystem level integration... Imagine if Microsoft made either of these moves.
Its about having apps screened and approved not about sales. Free apps (gratis) from the App Store can use iCloud for storage too.
Apple isn't stupid. They understand the only way to have a secure device is to only allow the good guys' code to run on it. That's not their idea. Whitelisting software is the only way to be secure. Do a little reading on computer security, this is old news. I'm glad to see that apple is bringing the app store to OSX. I do like the fact that my non-jailbroken IPAD can only get stuf from the app store and that people have to pay and identify themselves and their Mac to develop for the app store, and the apps are tested by the app store folks. I don't trust the apps on my android phone at all. I toyed with the idea of writing apps for iOS for my iPad, even borrowed a mac mini to try out XCode. I read the procedure for even getting your code on devices to test. There is full accountability. There won't be much malware in that walled garden. I'm ok with the process, this is where it needs to go.
(At a management meeting)
"Our product is growing vocal about certain issues. We can't have product dissenting from our views. Brainwash half and lock out the other half. Now excuse me while I take a sip of this delicious Coca Cola, whose every refreshing sip makes meetings go better."
(/Bitter)
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I can understand the average non-tech person liking Apple's stuff. While limited, it is simple and these people don't mind being locked in if they don't have to deal with issues that they will be unable to solve. But for the users of Slashdot (and I can name several users if necessary) to say how they love Apple products is absurd. For people who are suppose to be technologically adept to be using products that are locked down and have the sophistication of something made by fisher price telling others how great Apple products are? What happened here? I thought this site was full of people that liked technology that was open and robust that lets them do things the average person does not. It is just another sign that Slashdot is no longer a site for "nerds" anymore.
(Satire)
Of course they will.
The following companies are Too Big To Fail.
Apple
Google
Facebook
Microsoft
Sorta in that order.
All the rest of the tech world is second class until someone decisively shows that one of the emperors is wearing no clothes.
So of course the results will be quite fine for Apple. Not because of any sanity. But because I said SUDO the results will be fine for Apple.
(/Satire)
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I don't believe in a complete iOS-ization, at least not for the rest 5-6 years... It would be really difficult to reliably block terminal access which - by definition - bypasses all of Apple's measures like Gatekeeper etc. And for what purpose? It's not that an average Joe is going to play with the terminal anyway, it doesn't harm Apple's business IMO. At least I hope I'm right, it would be sad to have to go back to Linux just after switching to a Mac...
"All the rest of the tech world is second class until someone decisively shows that one of the emperors is wearing no clothes."
Funny thing is: Facebook stock today closed at barely over its opening price. Why?
Sorry, but the Tech Bubble was over 10 years ago. Nobody in their right mind buys stock at 100 times price/earnings ratio, unless they expect the company to grow, very fast.
The problem is: Facebook can't grow very fast. They probably have near their peak audience right now, considering that more and more people are getting fed up with them and their corporate "me first" policies.
And for once, not many people were fooled. Actually, the starting price of 38 was way too high... I would not have bought at a quarter of that much.
So yeah, Zuckerburg was out there actually kinda naked today. He might not have been wearing no clothes, but apparently he was wearing sheer underwear.
When I can encrypt files before they get sent to iCloud using my public key then I might consider giving a shit about this feature. Until then I'm happy keeping my documents and other files in our Git repository.
These alarmist act like we can't do the same thing now with Dropbox and not be tied to a particular OS.
I use my dropbox account way more than my iCloud.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
Only on Slashdot would making software usage "easier and more common" be seen as a bad thing.
Apple is the odd man out in that arrangement. The bulk of their products come from apple addicts who funnel a substantial portion of their digital recreational dollars through them, without making real world price comparisons. They are not gaining any new market share they are losing it, what they are trying to do is milk as much money as possible our of the religiously dedicated apple addict base. So the iTV will be targeted at them and if Apple have time the iGame console.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
genuine question, which indirectly might answer yours : can you easily access iCloud from non-Apple devices?
"DRM is like the Ford Pinto: it's a smooth ride, right up the point at which it explodes and ruins your day."-C.Doctorow
You can integrate any app with Google Docs - it doesn't need to be sold only on Android Marketplace.
(no idea about Office 365)
I've been rather disappointed with Lion compared to previous X's. It uses 2GB of wired (OS-rendered unavailable) memory compared to a tenth of that for Snow Leopard. They changed the default compiler from gcc to some in-house brew that has been problematic. Apple disliked the license Samba is distributed under and rolled their own, which doesn't work reliably. I had to shut Apple's off and install the real thing, pain to configure. Apple developer tools must be installed from the App store, costs nothing but you still need a credit card. And command-line tools doesn't install by default, which is most of what I want.
Lion has picked up a lot of crap code, and it will be a great effort to clean it up. Mountain Lion seems to go further in that direction. Snow Leopard is the bomb and I am happy to come home to it, but as a closed OS it can't evolve. Apple has caught up with the mistakes of Microsoft. I think I'm ready to make a Linux my primary OS.
"The ability to delude yourself may be an important survival tool" - Jane Wagner -
What I have wanted to ask macheads for a while is, do you see any need for MacOS 11 yet?
Actually this is false, as many publications have shown... repeatedly, time after time.
Mac products tend to be a little -- but only a little -- more expensive that other systems given the same hardware.
Apple tends to choose, in general, premium hardware for its products.
But magazine after magazine, and group after group, who have actually measured hardware quality and performance per dollar, have for many years now saying that Macs are just a little more expensive. And of course that doesn't account for the OS itself.
The notion that Macs are expensive for what they do and people own them just due to some kind of snobbery has been disproven for a long time.
Pardon me, typo in the tags. That wasn't all supposed to be bold.
I can't tell if this is satire.
They are not gaining any new market share they are losing it
This is untrue. They have been increasing their marketshare in computers for the past 6 or so years consecutively, in an industry that is stagnating in growth or even shrinking in some years. In the smartphone arena their marketshare is pretty stagnant, but their real-world numbers are increasing (the size of the market is growing, but their new users are cancelling out that proportional change). They are currently trading share back and forth with all other Android handset makers combined (which mainly means Samsung, who have the lion's share of that). They're certainly not in a position where they're panicking over marketshare and needing to "milk the religiously dedicated apple addict base" because that assumes that the bulk of their products are bought by these addicts, but that brings us to...
The bulk of their products come from apple addicts who funnel a substantial portion of their digital recreational dollars through them, without making real world price comparisons.
That really depends on whether you consider someone an "addict" if they value something that you don't. Just because you think an Apple product is too expensive for what it is doesn't mean that anyone who buys one hasn't weighed up the other options. They may simply have different criteria than you.
It also depends what you mean by "bulk" - if you mean in terms of the different numbers of product lines, then possibly they are all bought by "addicts". If you mean where their money comes from, then you're wide of the mark since that is the iPhone, and it sells far more than the total number of other Mac products combined, so they can't all be being bought by "apple addicts". They've sold over 100 million iPhones, and the numbers keep going up. Far too many to be simply the same fans just buying the new one every time it comes out - they're growing their user base. A large majority of people with an iPhone are first time Apple users, purely through a numbers game (subtract the total number of Apple computers from the total number of iPhones sold). I'm sure a lot of them had iPods, but Macs? The numbers simply don't add up. Hardly a "religiously dedicated apple addict base" (although there will clearly be some of those).
more reason to loose interest in hobby computing. I would guess that my next computer may end up being a Wii.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
Funny thing is: Facebook stock today closed at barely over its opening price. Why?
Because FB didn't get conned?
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/21/opinion/21nocera.html
A huge opening-day pop is not a sign of a successful I.P.O., but rather a massively mispriced one. Bankers are rewarding their friends and themselves instead of doing their fiduciary duty to their clients.
Car analogy: If your IPO shoots up a lot, it's like you PAYING someone to list your car for sale at a good price, but instead they under-price it, their close friends buy it and immediately sell it for twice the price.
I'm wondering how far they will be able to go with this until they *really* start loosing karma with IT experts, i.e.us. I'm mean really in the way that I say: "Awesome Hardware and value be damned, fully integrated *nix be damned, I'm going back to fiddling around with debian stable on some current UltraBook or sad-and-sorry mac mini rippoff because their OS has become to much of a pain and I'd rather spend 3 weeks configging my Window Manager than finding way around the lockin."
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Apple is the odd man out in that arrangement. The bulk of their products come from apple addicts who funnel a substantial portion of their digital recreational dollars through them...
Actually, it would seem the addicts are funneling their grocery money through Apple too. A crack dealer should have it so good.
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
". The bulk of their products come from apple addicts who funnel a substantial portion of their digital recreational dollars through them,"
So why is it that in the US, most people who can buy an iPhone without switching carriers do so?
From their own financial reports,,,,
Verizon: 51% of all smart phones sold last quarter were iPhones
AT&T: 80% of all smart phones sold were iPhones,
Sprint: 51% of all smart phones sold were iPhones.
That must be a relatively large cult.
But why should I care if the carriers have to pay more to subsidize the iPhone? The price I pay is no more than the equivalent Android.
" without making real world price comparisons. They are not gaining any new market share they are losing it,"
Right, that must be why revenue and profit is not doubling year over year. Ask HP how much good "market share" is when it comes to selling PCs......
"Car analogy: If your IPO shoots up a lot, it's like you PAYING someone to list your car for sale at a good price, but instead they under-price it, their close friends buy it and immediately sell it for twice the price."
Sure. But when your IPO shoots up NOT AT ALL, it is a sign of an overpriced IPO.
The issue is the 'given the same hardware' part. I'm typing this on a MacBook Pro, and I actually consider it to be quite good value, but I've tried looking for Macs for people with different requirements to me and it's often difficult because there are big gaps in Apple's lineup. They can get a machine that requires a load of after-market additions to do what they need (and therefore becomes expensive) or they can buy something that is overpowered for their needs (and therefore expensive), or they can buy something from another manufacturer that actually meets their requirements and costs significantly less than buying form Apple.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I understand why the tech community gets so worked up about this, but from the view of the "general" consumer, it's not a big deal. It just means AppStore apps will have a smoother integration with apps on iDevices compared to non-AppStore apps. The consumer will prefer the AppStore apps, as the experience will be seamless. Apple's main focus is on the consumer, to give the consumer a better experience, everything else is of lower priority. For any developer that sells apps on the AppStore, iCloud integration can be "sold" as an added value to a product.
If your IPO goes down, yes that's the sign of an overpriced IPO (if it doesn't move far from it, it's near the right price).
But if you managed to sell your car at a high price and buyers were not tricked or forced into buying it, I doubt you should feel unhappy or guilty. So were the buyers tricked? I don't think most were, they were speculators taking a bet. Maybe you should feel some shame if the price dropped to half or similar... But other than that, enjoy the profits from your sale...
Vaguely related spoof of the day: http://www.borowitzreport.com/2012/05/17/a-letter-from-mark-zuckerberg/
Is the bandwidth overage charges.. As caps lower and overage charges increase, you can forget the 'cloud', be it good or bad it wont matter as no one will be able to afford it and we will *need* to go back to hard CD distributions and local storage.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Macs are flimsy as hell they are not premium products but still sell for a premium price.
(When IBM made their laptops in house they were premium products - Panasonics Toughbook range is a premium product).
Lenovo made Thinkpads as good but they are better than average.
The OS could be OK but it doesn't have focus follows mouse so its useless to any ex UNIX user.
"If your IPO goes down, yes that's the sign of an overpriced IPO (if it doesn't move far from it, it's near the right price)."
No, that is the way it should work, not the way it has actually worked in recent years.
Facebook was selling for right around 100 p/e. That's an outrageous price, very reminiscent of the "tech bubble". It means that unless Facebook grows pretty quickly, it would take 100 years to earn as much as it was bought for.
And that means that unless it does grow quickly, it's a bad investment. The problem with that scenario is that Facebook is near saturation for what it is; it cannot grow quickly. That ship has already sailed.
Be seeing you!
Portions of iCloud can't even stay up. There have been a series of outages all week with their email service. It's been up about half the time for me. Apple reports that 1% are affected, yet the forums are full of it. I've had a lot of problems connecting to their services via my apple tv in the last few weeks too.
I don't trust them with all my data right now. They've proven to be unreliable. In fact, most cloud providers have had big outages at one point or another.
The fact that they don't let apps not distributed through the app store use the iCloud API is annoying, because I might be a developer offering the app from my web site and wanting to offer that feature, but it's hardly the end of the world. I can either sign up for the app store and make my app available through there or not. I know Apple is making signing keys available for developers to sign software outside the app store too, but I don't know the details on that.
More to the point, though, I don't want to use iCloud anyway. I have DropBox and Google Drive. They work on my Mac, on Windows, and on Android. iCloud doesn't exactly have an Android or Windows app yet.
For all the complaining that Apple is making Macs into iPads, I don't see it. You don't have to Jailbreak the OS to get root access, and you can install, compile, and run all sorts of stuff - Apple will even give you a compiler for free!
Because the walled garden worked so well for AOL.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
iCloud is a bad idea. It is insecure, open to hackers, the police and subject to warrantless searches.
Lion was a bad idea because it dropped support for a tremendous amount of software. It got in the way of my being able to do my work. I downgraded back to an OSX level where I can use the tools I need. Mountain Lion is worse. If Apple's going to take away the ability for us to do our work we'll not buy their hardware. I have Apple 17 machines I manage. No New Macs here.
Apple needs to go back to being an open platform where people can produce programs, tools, and access their data. Apple needs to start supporting Classic and PPC code again.
Apple loses.
All the annoyances of Linux, none of the freedom.
OS X apps can use the iCloud Documents APIs only if they are sold through the Mac App Store.
I don't use iCloud. I use DropBox. But the complaint is ridiculous. It's as ridiculous as calling it racism that an Italian Restaurant owner, of Italian decent, prefers to display photographs of Italian actors and sports heros in their restaurant, and not YOUR heros, regardless of your decent, even if you eat there [citation: Spike Lee].
Apple can do what it wants with its resources. This is not garden walling Apple's users in the least. Mac users will still be free to use any other of the many identical services that came before iCloud, and any that came after. You want total freedom? Use a nice linux distro, put your own server in a data center (easier and cheaper than you think), and make your own cloud. Or ... you know... copy the document off iCloud to a local drive, then copy it back up after you're finished with it using your app that you pirated. Or if you are truly 1337, use a chron job to sync your local documents to iCloud, and only work on local documents, secure in the knowledge that any changes you make locally will soon propagate to iCloud (what? rsync isn't available on the Mac AppStore?).
I'm sick of the malicious exaggerated scrutinizing editorial coming from slashdot submitters. It didn't used to be this way, and it doesn't need to be this way. We're supposed to have news for nerds here... not shill editorial from anti-Apple evangelists. Or maybe its just stupid people causing me to lose patience.
How about Google's garden walling? I use an iOS device... and Google, and many other website hosters, refuse to let me immediately and always load the full version of google.com everytime (unless I log in, set preferences, and allow Google to track my online search habits.) This is far more annoying than anything Apple is doing. It's truly browser bigotry. If a site detects a mobile device browser, more often than not, it won't give you a choice of which style of page you are allowed to load. (And lets all give thanks to web developers that ask the end user the first time they load the site, and allow this preference to be maintained through info kept in a local cookie).
This just in: the manufacturer of the gasoline car you drive requires you fill the tank with gasoline, and refuses to sell you a car that runs on both gas and diesel. I can't believe these car manufacturers... completely wrecking our freedom!
The Admin and the Engineer
argument over.
Yes you can, just go to icloud.com and log in.
just tried it, out of curiosity.
This is what I got :
"To use iCloud, first set it up with your Apple ID on a device with iOS5 or a Mac with OS X Lion 10.7.2. Not sure which Apple ID to use? Learn More"
So the answer ist actually "No. You can't"
"DRM is like the Ford Pinto: it's a smooth ride, right up the point at which it explodes and ruins your day."-C.Doctorow
So the answer ist actually "No. You can't"
Well your question was, can you access icloud, not setup an account. There's no reason to want an icloud account if you don't have an iOS device or a Mac, which is probably why you can't setup an account online.
I can't believe no one has mentioned that this is a move for security. Yup, if you want to go through Apple's cloud service to connect your mobile and desktop app, both apps have to be vetted by Apple and both have to be sandboxed. Apple's mechanism for vetting on iOS is the App store submission process. Apple's mechanism for vetting on OS X and the requirement for sandboxing is the Mac App store.
I'm not a big fan of Apple's model and I wish someone would build a store/repository that worked for both OSS and closed source software and had multiple, configurable inputs to the vetting process, configurable by a user, but even in that case it would be perfectly reasonable for any online service provider to require specific vetting before gaining access to the service.
Apple makes basically very little if anything selling apps in either store. It's about promoting their bread and butter hardware sales business and it's been working great. Occam's razor people... you don't need to invent a conspiracy to understand Apple's business strategy here or predict their next moves. I just wish some people creating competing solutions could look past the "Apple bad" mantra to see in what ways they are winning here and adapt open and inclusive services to offer the same level of security and user convenience.
just tried it, out of curiosity.
This is what I got :
"To use iCloud, first set it up with your Apple ID on a device with iOS5 or a Mac with OS X Lion 10.7.2. Not sure which Apple ID to use? Learn More"
So the answer ist actually "No. You can't"
Actually, Yes, you can
I think the misconception is that what seems to be happening is that when a consumer purchases an Apple product and uses it for a reasonable period of time, they then become by the authors definition a "religiously dedicated apple addict base" due to their satisfaction with that Apple product. In fact it delivers them the value they desire, for the price they are willing to pay, and they support and performance they have then come to expect. Based on real world experiences with other offerings (whether from MS, Google (aka Android), the various and sundry X flavors of the day, or the hardware side - Dell, Sony, white box, et.al., again Apple meets the criteria demanded by the consumer for the price they are willing to pay. Now if this doesn't happen to agree with your particular bias, the original author's method of attack seems to be to label and denigrate the large numbers of consumers that have already voted with their dollars. Please consider a more thoughtful and objective argument taking into account that other equally intelligent humans have a different and equally valid perspective.
There's no reason to want an icloud account if you don't have an iOS device or a Mac, which is probably why you can't setup an account online.
Of course there is, syncing outlook mail and contacts, safari bookmarks, using itunes match and i'm pretty sure you can use photostream too.
If your IPO goes down, yes that's the sign of an overpriced IPO (if it doesn't move far from it, it's near the right price).
Much more likely than 'picking the right price' it means the underwriters support the price by purchasing shares themselves...and the underwriters for Facebook's IPO certainly do seem to have a lot of shares.
I have no idea why everyone is getting so worked up about an entirely optional first-party feature that needs first-party approval and a cut of the sales back to the first-party to pay for it. And why do people who don't use Macs talk about this walled garden thing like it's already happened on the desktop? Newsflash - it hasn't!
What lock-in?
They are not gaining any new market share they are losing it
Huh? Where are you getting this?
What are you syncing the contacts to? All of the things you named are for syncing your data between a mac or pc and an ios device.
There is zero reason for wanting to use icloud if you don't own an iOS device or a mac. There are so many other services for windows that do a much better job at a cheaper price. If someone likes apples ecosystem enough to stomach itunes or safari on windows then they already own an iOS device or a mac.
What are you syncing the contacts to?
iCloud. Just like you sync your music collection to iCloud with iTunes match. It's a backup/restore mechanism.
There is zero reason for wanting to use icloud if you don't own an iOS device or a mac. There are so many other services for windows that do a much better job at a cheaper price.
Nothing else offers a service like iTunes match so already if you want that you have to go iCloud so unless there is some reason to have your contacts on a different service then you might as well use it for that too. Likewise the Safari bookmark syncing is just like the Google Chrome bookmark syncing, so if you use Safari then iCloud is obviously the way to go.