I installed iOS 4.2 beta on my iPad, but haven’t been able to check out the new AirPlay or AirPrint features yet: I don’t have an Apple Airport Express station to configure with my stereo, nor I have a compatible HP printer in the office. Still, I know these two new features pretty well: AirPlay is Apple’s take on how you should be able to consume digital content in the living room, AirPrint allows you to print documents from your iPad and iPhone with a few taps. Both of them are great features. I want to focus on AirPlay, though: as Seth Weintraub puts it, AirPlay is Apple’s “go to market” strategy - in a way that this single feature will let users easily hook their iPhones and iPads to the Apple TV to effortlessly share SD content, and eventually pay for HD versions using Apple’s TV own rental system. Any kind of video content can be streamed using AirPlay, as long as it uses a standard media controller and it’s encoded using the popular H.264 video format.
I haven’t tried it personally, but I already know AirPlay is going to be huge amongst iPad and iPhone owners once the new Apple TV will be available. This kind of one-tap streaming and sharing of content between devices has got me thinking, though: what if Apple shipped “AirFiles”, a built-in system to share any kind of documents across mobile devices and computers?
iOS doesn’t come with a visible filesystem, each app has its own database. There are many 3rd party apps that allow you to easily and quickly import content from other apps (say Pages or Numbers) and share it locally using built-in WebDAV servers or Bonjour connections, like iFiles or Air Sharing. I’ve been using iFiles for many months now and it works great for me. The downside to this is that there’s no native, one-tap, built-in and quick way to stream and share files from iPad / iPhone to a MacBook.
AirFiles would, of course, be radically different from AirPlay: we’re talking about sharing here, not exactly streaming. Sure, you could “stream” a live session of collaborative text editing, but let’s stick to the sharing aspect. Like I said, there’s no filesystem on iOS, and users have been asking for a way to effortlessly access and share documents without using apps’ own closed system for a long time now. Just like AirPlay, AirFiles would be system-wide and allow you to hit a share button any time the OS recognizes a compatible file. Be it a presentation, a PDF or a plain text file, AirFiles would require you, though, to install a desktop-side client - or maybe Apple could just come up with a way to embed the new system within iTunes.
As a matter of fact, the current version of iTunes allows you to play with files and databases sitting on the iPad from the desktop, but the system is broken: you can only import & export files, you can’t preview them, everything resides in a small screen buried deep down in iTunes and is a slow process. What we’re talking about here is a way to instantly share a file no matter who’s running what on his computer. Image this: the iPad is doing well in enterprise and you work in one of those offices that have deployed iPads recently. You’ve been working on a report for a few days, using Apple’s Numbers software on your new iPad. Your boss drops by and asks you if you could forward the spreadsheet to his computer. Now you have three choices:
- You email him the document from the iPad;
- You import the document using iTunes on your desktop computer and then send it to your boss;
- You tap the AirFiles button and instantly send the report to your boss computer.
AirFiles would be geared towards both casual and professional users, and it would come with standard and enterprise features. It would allow you to send a file (or multiple ones at once) upon or without client-side confirmation, and it would be accessible from any app, at any time. Being files already stored on your device (unlike video content, which can be streamed from the internet and then forwarded to the Apple TV using AirPlay), you’d be able to access apps databases using AirFiles anywhere on the OS. Even on the springboard, with widget controls in the multitasking bar. Think of it as OS X standard CMD+O “Open File” menu, with wireless sharing capabilities between devices. Let’s go even further: AirFiles would allow you to browse files stored on any device from any device.
Most of all, AirFiles would revolutionize iOS, all over again. Here’s to hoping Apple will come up with something like this.
