DropCopy for the iPhone is one of those super-cool sounding apps that I previously would have read about and envied Mac users over. From the first time I saw it mentioned I thought it sounded like a great little app, but it seemed clear there were no pressing plans to port it to Windows – and since it’s an app that makes file transfer between your computer and your iPhone (or potentially also between mutliple iPhones or Touches if you have ’em), it was no good to me on a Windows machine.
But … I have recently (about 3 weeks ago) done the typical ‘iPhone Gateway Drug‘ switch over to a MacBook laptop. I am generally extremely happy with the switch – loving the performance of the Mac, not finding the transition very difficult, happily running XP in a virtual machine, and so on. And one of the little bonuses that I’m getting an extra kick out of over the last few weeks is trying out some of the nice Mac-only apps for the iPhone, like DropCopy.
Some of the very best apps on any platform are the dead simple ones – the ones that do one thing, but do it very well and make it drop-dead easy to do. DropCopy fits that bill quite nicely. Its sole purpose it to make file transfer between computers or (in this case) computer and iPhone easy and quick. And it does this very well. Setup on both the Mac and the iPhone is quick and their are minimal settings to configure on the Mac – just simple things like what directory to save incoming files to, do you want to be prompted to confirm incoming items (yes please), and display preference sort of settings.
On the Mac, that’s about it – once you launch it DropCopy is ready to go – and you can simply grab a file from anywhere, drag it over the Drop Zone (a small circle that DropCopy adds near the top left of your desktop) and hover it over a destination (another Mac or iPhone) and away the file transfer goes.
On the iPhone, it’s even simpler – once DropCopy is installed, when you launch it you get a nice little bit of help text on the screen to walk you through sending files from the iPhone to your PC
From there, as the help text tells you, you just tap the drop zone on the iPhone and get taken out to an Explorer / Finder type screen where you can choose which files to transfer, and away you go with file transfer in the opposite direction. You even get a nice little confirmation message when transfer is done.
By default, all incoming files go to ~/Media/DropCopy. Incoming .pdf files are sent to the /Media/PDF directory.
One of the slick things about DropCopy is that as soon as you exit the app, it is no longer active or listening / available for transfers – so it poses no security risk or potential battery drain issues.
DropCopy is a great little tool – much quicker and simpler to use for general file transfer than an SSH session.
To learn more about DropCopy and a lot of its other advantages, I recommend this great article, which was one of the first ones that had me envying those Mac users.
To get DropCopy for the Mac, go HERE – and to get it for the iPhone, just grab it on Installer …
Tags: DropCopy, Mobile DropCopy, DropCopy on iPhone, iPhone file transfer, iPhone native apps
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