_Dear Friends,_

Vermont is back in the freezer as April becomes the most frustrating month for the Green Mountains. The days are longer, there is sun but it is too early to work in the garden. The roads are muddy and while the black flies haven’t awoken yet, it is hard to stay in the house but challenging to go outside.

The iPad Pro 9.7-inch model has arrived at our stores and the initial sales have been strong. While this new iPad, at first glance, looks like the old iPad, once people start using it, playing with the Apple Pencil and realizing the advancements of this latest iPad they are hooked. Size-wise, I think that it might be ideal. The iPad Pro 12-inch model is, well it is big. The iPad mini is good for reading or checking your email abut the 9.7-inch iPad Pro is just right.

I am very pleased to introduce the latest member of the Small Dog Team, Amy Farnsworth, who joins us as our Marketing and Design manager. Amy has strong marketing and graphic design background from her work in Utah and has recently relocated to Vermont with her husband. She says “I am a graphic designer, daydreamer, dog lover, wife, sister, best friend, Netflix junky & secret dad joke lover.” I think she will fit in fine! Please join me in welcoming Amy!

This week’s Kibbles & Bytes exclusive features the Apple Certified Refurbished MacBook Pro. This is not a stripped down MacBook Pro but a fully-configured unit ready for your toughest challenges. It features the 2.8 GHz i7 intel processor, 16GB of ram, a 1TB hard drive and the NVIDIA 750M graphics chip driving the awesome “15-inch Retina display.”:http://www.smalldog.com/wag900002189 This Macbook Pro comes with the same 1-year warranty as new Macbook Pros but we are bundling it this week with Applecare that not only extends that 1-year warranty to 3-years but also extends your 90-days of free tech support from Apple to 3-years as well. “Kibbles & Bytes readers save $100 on this bundle at only $2925.98!”:http://www.smalldog.com/wag900002189

With all the news surrounding the government’s attempt to force Apple to write software that doesn’t exist to crack an iPhone, iCloud has been in the news, too! Do you use iCloud? Apple has some huge server farms to support this amazing technology and I thought it would be good to do a brief review of some of the features as they relate to Safari.

iCloud has sort of settled to the back of my mind because it just does its thing in the background and serves up features that I take for granted. But this week, I ran into a dilemma that puzzled me for some time. I noticed that I had accidentally deleted one of my folders in my Safari favorites bar. These were important bookmarks and I needed them back. Well, like a good boy, I have a Time Machine backup and quickly went back in time and restored my Safari bookmarks from a time before I had deleted them. Good stuff, but when I went to look the next morning, the folder was gone again. This happened a few times with me going back in time to get the .plist file. Then I figured it out – I had Safari active in iCloud so my bookmarks were being synced in the cloud. So, every time I restored it, it would eventually be overwritten by iCloud. The solution? Really sort of simple, I turned off Safari in iCloud preferences and turned it back on, problem solved.

Activating Safari in iCloud gives you some great tools. You can start browsing on your iPad and pick up seamlessly from your Mac or you iPhone. It syncs your bookmarks and tabs and if you also use iCloud Keychain it will remember all those passwords for the websites you visit. If you use the reading list function of Safari it will also keep those current across your devices.

As with the other features of iCloud, the features only work if you are signed on with the same Apple ID on all of your devices. It won’t know that you are signed onto one AppleID with your Mac and another with your iPhone. Most common issues with iCloud come down to this simple issue. Apple has not made it easy to merge Apple IDs so at least for iCloud you should be consistently using the same Apple ID. Open the iCloud System Preference on your Mac and choose Safari to activate iCloud on your Mac or go to the iCloud Setting on your iPhone or iPad to activate.

You can also access the Safari tabs that you have open on your Mac on your iPhone or iPad. It is a bit different looking on the iPhone or iPad. Open Safari on your iPhone or iPad and then tap the tabs icon. You will see all of your open Safari windows but if you scroll down at the bottom will be all the tabs open on your Mac and you can click on any of those to make it active.