I was going to complain about AirDrop being proprietary, but this is very disappointing. What is wrong with Apple?
> It’s important to note that while AirDrop in iOS 7 and AirDrop in OS X share the same name and underlying technology (both work by transmitting files over a peer-to-peer Wi-Fi connection), they aren’t actually compatible with one another. You can AirDrop things from iOS to iOS and from OS X to OS X, but not from iOS to OS X or vice versa. All the reports I can find say that this situation doesn’t change with Mavericks.
I know. I can't ever imagine a time when I wanted to share something with an iPhone next to me (my friends are usually faraway, or if we're hanging out then we're not using our phones).
But several times a day I wish I could beam a photo, a Notes text file, etc., from my iPhone to my Macbook Air. In the end I'm just constantly e-mailing links/photos/etc. to myself, which never ceases to seem ridiculous in 2013.
The problem is that most people want to use clouds services that are flexible and can interface with lots of things besides just Apple stuff. Native apps can interconnect with iCloud via APIs, but what about all the other services we use that are not native apps. Just look at IFTTT for example. No cloud is an island.
The issue is that things work totally differently. AirDrop for the Mac works via multi-association wifi, which takes a decent amount of power. That is less noticeable on a device with a large battery, and Apple designed the UI in such a way that it only turns on when sharing is occurring.
On iOS it still uses multi-association wifi for the actual sharing, but it uses Bluetooth LE for the discovery. That allows it to be active at all times, which is very important given that on iOS most of the time AirDrop will be initiated while the app receiving the drop is completely inactive. The problem is that if Apple were to move Mavericks over to Blue LE discovery it would impact backward compatibility with existing AirDrop to Macs running older OSes, and it would have issues since some Macs that support AirDrop don't have Bluetooth LE compatible hardware. Not to mention you would have a lot more (and more confusing) use cases to deal with in the UI.
I expect them to move Mac OS over to iOS compatible AirDrop eventually, but it is not just a simple oversight. It is going to have to be a transition that has some thought put into it.
On iOS it still uses multi-association wifi for the actual sharing, but it uses Bluetooth LE for the discovery. That allows it to be active at all times, which is very important given that on iOS most of the time AirDrop will be initiated while the app receiving the drop is completely inactive.
Just tested this, and my iPad doesn't show up until I open the "control panel". Still it'll save battery by using only bluetooth for the initial scan.
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.
> 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.
> 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:
My iCloud account is already at data capacity (with a paid addon at that) with my iPhone and iPad backups. It's also a huge pain waiting for a million photos to sync when I want just this one. I'm also not happy with the privacy aspects of Photostream if I've taken private photos.
I mean, it works. But it's not elegant nor efficient. The Dropbox method sucks too. I often don't have Wifi (or it's hotel/airport wifi where you're limited to 1 device), and then I wish I was back on my dumbphone...
So the shared photo streams are effectively free photo album storage you can keep private or share with friends.
It also doesn't wait for a million photos to sync. It syncs the most recent one(s) you just took. It's hard to imagine more elegant or efficient than "it just happens without you doing anything".
It sounds like you're not very familiar with how Photostream really works. That's not unusual, a lot of my people I know complain about things that it turns out Photostream supports because Apple never really pushed or promoted it.
> I often don't have Wifi (or it's hotel/airport wifi where you're limited to 1 device), and then I wish I was back on my dumbphone...
You're in luck; iOS has a switch to turn off 3G data and become a dumb phone.
If you're in the mood for the dumb phone style manual management instead of an automatic photo stream , there are several really great apps for popping single photos over or sharing the clipboard. I personally use a clipboard app that I can "copy" a photo on the iOS device and on my Mac just "paste" it somewhere. That one works over ad-hoc WiFi so doesn't need a WiFi base. Others work over bluetooth.
I stand corrected on the Photo stream data thing. My experience with it is not that it syncs the recent ones first. My experience is they pop in randomly, then it stalls for half an hour for no reason. Maybe it's gotten better recently.
It's still ridiculous that the answer to "I want to send this thing between these two devices in front of me" is "I have to send every photo I take to a server owned by a company somewhere".
Clearly Apple agrees, or they wouldn't have created AirDrop in the first place!
> I personally use a clipboard app that I can "copy" a photo on the iOS device and on my Mac just "paste" it somewhere. That one works over ad-hoc WiFi so doesn't need a WiFi base. Others work over bluetooth.
He said he wanted to send a photo to his Mac, not all his other devices, Apple and whoever else has acces to Apple's servers. AirDrop would have seemed like the logical solution.
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.
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.
Realistically it could be done a la DropBox - i.e., another app (lets call it AirDrop) that receives these files and can launch the App associated with the file. Users could send the file through AirDrop.app by sending that file to AirDrop.
> It’s important to note that while AirDrop in iOS 7 and AirDrop in OS X share the same name and underlying technology (both work by transmitting files over a peer-to-peer Wi-Fi connection), they aren’t actually compatible with one another. You can AirDrop things from iOS to iOS and from OS X to OS X, but not from iOS to OS X or vice versa. All the reports I can find say that this situation doesn’t change with Mavericks.