One of my first reactions upon seeing the iPad rollout was, “Oh great. It’s hard enough to keep track of my information across my laptop and iPhone… now I have a third platform to worry about.”
Sure enough, when I got my iPad last week this quickly emerged as a pain point.
Apple decided in its noble quest for simplicity that the file system should be kept invisible. Simple, right? Just don’t worry your pretty little head about it.
It’s a great idea until you actually need to transfer files. Then it amounts to a really bad idea.
What happens is that each file transfer and remote document viewing app (Air Sharing, GoodReader, DropBox, iBooks, Stanza, etc.) has no choice but to reinvent its own UI for transferring and managing files. The resulting user experience is massively inconsistent.
And, all of these buckets of files are siloed. No app can see see another’s contents. The user is left having to remember what PDF is accessible from which app.
The iOS (was iPhone OS) needs to expose the file system to people who need it. There should be a clear, obvious way of transferring files among the devices.
Here is the demo I’d like to see some day: The iPad or iPod “desktops” show up as an extension of the PC’s desktop. The user drags a file or folder from the PC to the iPad’s “desktop”. Yes, the mouse cursor extends off your screen and onto the iPad* (*there’s already an app for this). Boom… file transferred and accessible to all apps.
For bonus points: let the user indicate that changes to the files or folders should be kept in sync across all media.
Phil, my uncle who is a computer sci prof said the same thing as you about what is the main prob with IPAD. Great minds think alike!
totally agree. i hate that the different apps i have that allow saving and wifi transfer of documents all do something totally different.
there should be an open API either provided by apple or some generous developer that creates a single, best way of transferring files via:
- wifi (as airsharing and others do it)
this should be extended so i can download multiple files easily through a web browser, as well as upload (not just one file at a time, ugh). also love that i can mount my air-shared drive on my pc and drag and drop, they did a great job with that
- bluetooth
cmon, this should be baked right in so we can easily transfer to other bt devices (phones! laptops!)
- usb cable
i had an app on my windows mobile phone years ago, if you turned it on then plugged in your phone via USB, instead of syncing like normal, it would mount as a drive on the desktop. it was awesome for using the phone as a USB drive
- dropbox, box.net, etc
everyone rolls their own way of doing this on the ipad/iphone. a solid,3rd party set of libraries and components so they all worked the same would be really smart.
I’m with ya, MC!
While we’re at it, how about robust APIs to let each device discover the others in the user’s working set within the LAN? Wasn’t that what Bonjour/Rendezvous was supposed to be all about?
And also across the Internet, DynDNS-style?
And how about accompanying APIs for synchronization of {files, folders, contacts, appointments, photos, any other data records}, so everyone doesn’t have to roll their own? (Mobile Me is meh.)
Now we’re starting to get the underpinnings for having a smooth(er) experience across all these devices.
That said, even if the interoperability plumbing was in place, the iOS is fundamentally a different platform than Mac OS. Users have many years of incompatibilities to sort through. Different apps to buy, different UI’s, different file formats.