From the looks of things, OS X is all about refinement: finding the rough edges of personal computing and smoothing them out into a nice polish. One of the roughest edges? Transferring files on your local network. Enter AirDrop.
It’s Apple’s new visual tool for transferring files over Wi-Fi to and from computers on your local network. You start it up, see a circle of the computers connected to the network you’re on, and drag a file onto a machine to send it over. The other computer gets a pop-up asking to confirm the transfer, and off the file goes. Everything automatic. As someone who’s in the midst of migrating to a new computer, variously File Sharing, emailing, Dropboxing and flash drive-ing crap back and forth, this is a welcome addition to Lion. Let me AirDrop files to trusted friends on other networks and you’ve really got something.
Images via Mac Life
Shane
Tuesday, June 7, 2011 at 11:32 AMGive how wonderfully well my PC’s and Mac’s talk to each right now, I’ll be interested to see just how well this works.
By the way, I’m be sarcastic ;)
With some presuation, I can get my macs to appear in the “network” on my PC’s and visa versa, but it’s not plug’n'play I can tell you.
olearymo
Tuesday, June 7, 2011 at 2:39 PMMan, I find it nearly as hard to get two Macs to talk properly. Well they do, but it’s so convoluted to actually put a file on my fiance’s desktop.
AirDrop will be a welcome development.
Evan
Thursday, June 9, 2011 at 12:37 PMwhen you say the rough edges of personal computing, you mean the rough edges of apple specific personal computing. File transfer between to Win7 PC’s is easier than pie.