The author touched on something that has bothered me for years. It's been how long since Windows came out? Since te internet became common for home PCs?
And yet we still can't share files. I'm serous, we can't. Not out of the box, not on any of the common OSes.
Try this. You have a document - be it picture, PDF, whatever. You want to share it with someone in the same room as you. Can you, on a stock, out-of-the-box machine (i.e. no special software installed/configured) get the file to the other machine faster than using a memory stick? Nope. Windows File Sharing is a joke, Apple File Sharing a bit less so (thanks to Zeroconf/Bonjour) but still crappy...
The sort of ad-hoc file sharing problem has been grating on me for years - we've advanced so dramatically in every field, but still cannot manage this very simple problem.
I saw Avatar recently, and this split-second scene where one of the scientists grabbed an image on a desktop machine and "tossed" it onto his tablet... that blew my mind way more than it should have. Without the whiz-bang touchscreen holographic technology, the premise of this operation should be second nature to us by now.
Easy file sharing effectively was killed by network security back in the 1990s. In times of Windows 95 it wasn't too hard to share, if you forget about endless bugs, glitches and inadequacy in detecting computers around you in early versions of Windows. Since Microsoft realized security their networking has become even less adequate and less usable.
The best solution I came up with for my family was, so far, Skype. The fact that Skype is closed source and I otherwise wouldn't use it is regrettable, but it gets sharing right. In fact, better than anything else that I know.
Every time a family member wants to share something with me - a link or a file - my answer is short: open Skype, click on my name, grab the file and drop it "onto me". Most importantly, very little prior setup is needed: actually downloading Skype and opening an account, which novice users and kids who can't write usually need assistance in anyway. Once set up, Skype communication works even if you move to a different location. Actually any point in the world.
All in all, this is genius and simple in such a degree that a 3-4 year old child, if not younger, can understand and do easily.
Thankfully, Skype establishes direct connections between computers, although honestly I don't know how exactly this works behind the same NAT/firewall device, which is usually your WiFi router.
Back to Apple and Paul Buccheit, of course Paul gets the problem right as usual, I just wonder if Steve Jobs and his team think the same way. Something suggests Apple should be thinking in the same direction and so my expectations from iWhateverIsNext are high.
Edit: I just realized that there's actually one slight paradigm shift that makes sharing easier with Skype: that's a shift from sharing between computers to sharing between people. You have a person's name possibly (and better) with his/her picture. This works so much better than the archaic "computer name", "workgroup" or whatever else. What "workgroup" in my own house?
That's what I meant when I said less shitty - but still shitty.
More often than not, when I want to share a file with someone, I want to share a file, not the whole folder, and certainly not a specific folder. With OSX's file sharing you have to manually drag your file into the shared folder (assuming you've enabled it) - and unless you want anyone to be able to access it willy-nilly, you're going to have to password it (possibly resulting in creating a new account on your machine). Sound fun yet?
At least it beats Windows - Windows file sharing is equally convoluted, and on top of it will fail to connect in almost every single networking environment I've ever tried it in. So on top of being hard to use, it just doesn't WORK.
The solution is so convoluted, and fits the standard use case so poorly, that it may as well not exist at all. IMHO the bar to beat is the memory stick - if I can share a file with someone in the room for less effort than copying it onto a USB stick, we've won.
I will say that technically, that option is there, but in my experience, it very rarely works as well as it should. We've just reverted to using Dropbox.
I find it funny that Apple recently just provided an easy way to share music: you see the other computer's music library in iTunes and can just drag and drop songs from there.
And yet we still can't share files. I'm serous, we can't. Not out of the box, not on any of the common OSes.
Try this. You have a document - be it picture, PDF, whatever. You want to share it with someone in the same room as you. Can you, on a stock, out-of-the-box machine (i.e. no special software installed/configured) get the file to the other machine faster than using a memory stick? Nope. Windows File Sharing is a joke, Apple File Sharing a bit less so (thanks to Zeroconf/Bonjour) but still crappy...
The sort of ad-hoc file sharing problem has been grating on me for years - we've advanced so dramatically in every field, but still cannot manage this very simple problem.
I saw Avatar recently, and this split-second scene where one of the scientists grabbed an image on a desktop machine and "tossed" it onto his tablet... that blew my mind way more than it should have. Without the whiz-bang touchscreen holographic technology, the premise of this operation should be second nature to us by now.