Mac Daddy World

We just finished some marathon coding and are happy to announce iPhoneDrive. In a nutshell, it lets you use your iPhone for file storage by providing an easy file browser interface. Version 1.0 is very functional considering that it was written in about one week. The demo version works just like the paid version but only for a 7 day period.

It supports drag and drop to and from the iPhone. It also supports transfer of entire folders. This makes it easy to move large directories back and forth between your Mac and your iPhone. Since the iPhone uses USB 2.0, the transfer speed is very fast. Now you can put those spare gigabytes to good use. Backup your important files! Your hard disk could fail at any moment! Do it now!

Here’s a screenshot:

Reinventing the Wheel

You can see we used an NSBrowser for the file browser. If you’ve ever tried to use one of these you’d know that they’re not very useful out of the box. Drag and drop has to be implemented manually, and the updating of cell data is very flaky, requiring many work-arounds. Also, they don’t do many of the things that you’d come to expect from the Finder’s column view mode.

All said and done, the interface came out pretty good. I just wish Apple would update NSBrowser to support more of the things found in the Finder column view. Obviously the Finder isn’t implemented using NSBrowser (it’s not even Cocoa for that matter), but it would be nice to have things like elipsification, marquee selecting, and drag and drop in there without having to reinvent the wheel.

We welcome any feedback about iPhoneDrive. Leave a comment here or use the feedback form on the main Ecamm website.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 10th, 2007 at 7:48 pm and is filed under Apple, Cocoa, Hardware, Objective-C. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.