SAN FRANCISCO (CBS 5 / CNET) — Apple CEO Steve Jobs, making his second major public appearance since he went on medical leave in January, announced an online cloud storage service called iCloud that’s designed to make it simple to wirelessly share music, e-mail, photos, calendars, and other data between handheld gadgets and desktop computers.

He received a standing ovation as he appeared at the World Wide Developers Conference at San Francisco’s Moscone Center on Monday to announce the new Apple service which has been the subject of intense speculation for more than a year.

The iCloud attempts to harness the power and flexibility of cloud computing for home users. It uses techniques that have already proved popular with businesses to make it easier to move data stored on Apple’s servers back and forth between multiple devices and applications.

James Brown’s “I Feel Good” played over the loudspeakers just before Jobs walked on stage, looking thin, in his signature outfit of mock turtleneck and blue jeans.

One audience member shouted out, “we love you.”

Tim Bajarin, president of Creative Strategies and a longtime Apple watcher, said Jobs didn’t look much different from when he made a surprising appearance in March to announce the iPad 2.

KCBS Technology Analyst Larry Magid Comments:

Before announcing the iCloud at Monday’s conference, Jobs unveiled a new operating system for Mac computers called Lion. With it, Apple Inc. is expanding the number of “gestures” users can perform on a MacBook trackpad, for instance to jump from application to application.

KCBS’ Doug Sovern Reports:

In another nod to bringing the computer closer to the iPhone and iPad, Apple is also adapting more applications to run in full-screen mode rather than in smaller windows.

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