Apple makes iCloud.com look like a iPad homescreen

Apple has updated iCloud.com to make the site look and feel significantly more modern, adding widget-like tiles that show you information from photos, notes, mail, and more (via MacRumors). It’s a big change from the previous version of the site, which basically just showed a handful of icons that acted as links to web apps, and should be a welcome upgrade for anyone who has to regularly access their iCloud data from a browser rather than an app running on an iPhone or Mac.

With the new design, which was available to beta testers last month, you can customize your iCloud.com homepage, adding tiles that can show your most recent photos, emails, documents, calendar events, notes, and more. Like with most iOS widgets, though, you’ll still have to jump into the apps if you want to do anything with that info; if you click the tick circle next to a reminder, you’ll just be taken to the Reminders web app. It’ll show you where the list lives with the reminder you clicked, but you’ll have to click the circle again when the web app loads to actually mark the task as completed.

Still, it’s nice to be able to see some important info at a glance, and to have some options about what info the home page puts front-and-center.

The pages that let you manage your iCloud account settings from a browser have also gotten a fresh coat of paint; this PCMag article offers a good idea of what they used to look like.

In terms of what you can actually do with the site, I didn’t notice any groundbreaking new features. The iCloud versions of apps like Pages and Numbers get updated at their own cadence, and mostly feel the same as they did the last time I used them. For anyone who regularly has to use those web apps, though, the experience of getting to them from iCloud.com should be just a bit nicer now.