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prehkugler | 12 years ago

It's important to ask yourself what you would do if you could AirDrop from your iOS device to an OS X device. Even though under the covers iOS and OS X work on files, iOS is sandboxed where OS X isn't, i.e. if you can't get to it via USB, you couldn't get to it via AirDrop anyway.

With that said, it would be useful to have some of the iTunes/iPhoto functionality for wireless(AirDrop) a la carte file transfer, but most people will just use iTunes wifi sync to get this effect.

discuss

kalleboo|12 years ago

> It's important to ask yourself what you would do if you could AirDrop from your iOS device to an OS X device

Quickly send photos I just took to put in email, IMs or on web forums. I used to do that constantly before I had an iPhone using Bluetooth, it was super-handy. Now I have to take a pointless long-cut through the internet with something like Dropbox. Royal pain when you're somewhere with spotty upstream internet.

Terretta|12 years ago

> Quickly send photos I just took to put in email, IMs or on web forums.

All the photos you just took are available via Photostream on all your other devices, assuming you have WiFi, which presumably you'd need for Dropbox. If you don't like firing up iPhoto or Aperture to see your photo stream on the desktop, there are "apps for that".

If you don't want an app, here's how to put a shortcut to your latest photos right on your dock:

http://howto.cnet.com/8301-11310_39-57555169-285/access-your...

fredsted|12 years ago

Even though iOS is sandboxed, has no files and no folders, lets not forget AirDrop on Mac doesn't do folders either. It almost looks like attachments: you drag (send) a file to the receiver. iOS handles mail attachments fine. I think this is something apple will implement later via software updates. Like for example obvious but long awaited OS X features like iBooks, Maps, Messages and Finder tabs. We're are wondering why they just didn't include it from the start, maybe they need a reason to sell OS X 10.10.

prehkugler|12 years ago

This seems like a possible win for Apple, and I hope they implement it. I just wanted to point out that OSX to iOS AirDrop is not as trivial as many people make it sound. There are edge cases, such as "what if the user doesn't have an app that supports this file?". It's different than email, because the file can't be saved in anyone's sandbox.