The Apple internet revolution we wanted didn’t happen. We needed a unified service that could let us store all our media and personal information inside the ether. But we didn’t get it. So forget the fruit stand; we’re going rogue.

The dream is a single service that invisibly shuttles data to and from our phones and computers; streams an unlimited jukebox of music and videos to every device we own; stores every photo and video we snap within the cloud. It’s email, texts and voicemails, easily accessed from anywhere or anything. Briefly, seamless ubiquity of every little thing we care about. Apple’s still far from getting there. But you would cloudify your life at the moment and get pretty on the brink of the dream with slightly bit of legwork.

Store everything you care about online

Dropbox is the wet dream of online storage and sync. New users get 2GB of free storage-which you’ll pump to 10GB by getting your folks to sign on . Dropbox syncs data across multiple computers and devices, and makes it easy to share files with just a few clicks. (It’s easy to setup, say, a private music sharing service between you and a number of friends). The file syncing speed and simplicity-of-use puts iDisk to shame, frankly. Better still, it has mobile apps for all iOS devices and Android, with a BlackBerry app on the style, so you’ll be able to access files from your smartphone.

Due to the way it syncs files, there’s also a ton of clever ways to take advantage of Dropbox, like starting torrents from any computer. Personally, I exploit it as an alternative for a Docs folder-by saving all of my text files in Dropbox, I will be able to pick up wherever I left from any computer, and never again worry about a computer crash putting off my critical docs. (And with Elements , edit them from my iPhone or iPad too.)

If you’re just in quest of raw online storage, Windows Live SkyDrive drops 25GB to your lap at no cost.

Dump all of your photos and videos inside the cloud

Flickr is how one can go for online photo and video storage and sharing. It’s got essentially the mostsome of the most massive community, a number of the most extensive tools, and with the brand new redesign, looks fresher than ever. Attributable to the massive community, Flickr plugins and apps abound for basically every platform and device, from dedicated upload(e)r apps to iPhoto bolt-ons, and a great mobile app for iPhone which could now upload multiple photos within the background. Flickr’s massiveness also means it’s more likely than most to be integrated into other service and devices, like Apple TV, Facebook and other stuff. Free accounts come with 100MB of storage a month, and a pro account with unlimited storage is barely $25 a year.

Write and edit notes anywhere

While Dropbox + Elements satisfies most of my requirements for writing anywhere, it’s hard to deny the appeal of Simplenote , which stores plain text notes online, easily accessible from desktops or iPhone/iPad with free apps. Everything is synced quickly and seamlessly. It’s great. (It’s got a wiser interface Evernote, though one can go that route in addition.) Check up on Lifehacker’s definitive guide to getting it installed everywhere you may wanna capture text.

Read ebooks on any screen you’ve got

One word: Kindle. Free apps for Mac, PC, Android and iPhone let you snag your Kindle books on well-nigh anything, anytime you wish. The apps sync where you left off, bookmarks and highlights. And it’s the service that seems probably to be left standing at the tip of the excellent ebook war, so you are able to breathe (slightly) easier in regards to the fact every new bestseller is wrapped up in DRM.

Consume your complete music and video you want

Sadly, Lala is dead, and Apple hasn’t brought back it back as an iTunes that lives within the cloud. Worse, Spotify, probably the most obvious choice to completely replace iTunes with a jukebox inside the sky-complete with an iPhone app with offline caching-isn’t available within the US. Lifehacker has a handy guide to streaming services . Any totally on-demand service is going to run you $5-$10 a month, but your best bets are Rhapsody or Rdio , which both have millions of songs available for unlimited streaming, and apps for PC, Mac, iPhone and Android. an enormous perk of Rhapsody? The iPhone app has local caching for offline playback. While you’re more flexible, there’s always radio-style services like Pandora and Last.FM.

To stream music from your desktop for your phone, though, SubSonic is among the better easy methods to go-a $5 app takes out a lot of the hassle. And, slightly more robust than iTunes’ new(ish) native Home Sharing, MediaRover syncs iTunes libraries across multiple PCs and Macs, even backing up the shared, combined library to a NAS for access by all. (Oh, and it makes for simple access from your Xbox 360 or PS3.)

Video’s slightly trickier. There’s no strategy to get an entire catalog for someone service, but when you’re going to drop money each month, Netflix is the ideal bet for a subscription that’ll stream movies to most any screen in your home-iOS devices, Mac, PC, Xbox 360, Blu-ray players, TVs, you name it. It syncs where you last left off in a movie, so you start watching in your TV and pick up on an iPad. And hey! You can even get a kind of shiny discs within the mail each month, if you need.

Stream video to an iPad or iPhone? AirVideo makes it easy, and supports multiple formats, like MKV and Divx.

Access your contacts, email, calendars, texts and voicemail anywhere

This might in addition be called ” the Google Section,” since Google provides one of the simplest ways to frictionlessly sync your entire critical info across multiple devices.

First, you’ll wanna installed Gmail and calendar sync together with your PC or Mac . Fortunately, syncing Google contacts with the Mac address book is simple-it’s just a checkbox under Accounts in Preferences. Here’s methods to set it up in Outlook .

Google Sync for Mobile uses Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync to sync mail, contacts and calendars from your Google account with full over-the-air push powers. The catch is that it becomes your master contact list, erasing the remainder of them from the phone, so ascertain they’re all uploaded for your Google account. (On the plus side, Google Contacts sucks an awful lot below it used to.)

You can sync additional calendars from other accounts by setting them as CalDAV accounts (which matches for iCal, or any other app with CalDAV support in addition). Same goes for email-just set them as a standard IMAP account , which keeps your email in sync across multiple devices. Oh, and in case you just want push email notifications without dealing with this mess, the Google iPhone app permit you to know when new emails arrive for a single account.

Google Voice , now open to everyone , is the magic that’ll will let you access your voicemails and text messages from any phone (with an honest browser) or desktop. And, now you may make free calls along with your Google Voice number from Gmail (moreover these 10 tricks from Lifehacker ).

Sync your bookmarks to everything with an online browser

The free program Xmarks will sync your bookmarks across multiple browsers and computers-though you’ll should use iTunes to push them right down to your iPhone. (There’s also Firefox Sync for Mozilla diehards.)

Command your computer from anywhere

Vee. Enn. See. In the event you wanna control your computer from anywhere, accessing files, starting off torrents or whatever else you could wanna do by remote controlling your house computer, VNC is easy methods to go. Just follow this handy how-to lead .

It takes much more effort than it will to perfectly live your life where everything’s connected, but once everything’s tied together, it’s…comforting.

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This post is tagged: apple internet, computer crash, internet revolution, multiple computers, music sharing service