This is pretty much useless for most people, but I feel DataCase, the iPhone file storage application, is being sorely misrepresented.
For some reason, Air Sharing is touted to be the best choice and I always wonderd why. Well, I just found out that I had already purchased Air Sharing when it was new (I tried purchasing it yesterday then I was informed that I already owned it – hence had a free upgrade 1 Which is the case for all iPhone apps you purchase
So I finally tried them both and here’s the lowdown:
I’ll keep it short and sweet:
DataCase beats Air Sharing.
First, I created this map, (2165×700) and loaded it to Air Sharing (just like I did with DataCase) and view it. You can try downloading it yourself – then try to zoom into it with Air Sharing… notice that it blanks out at some point when you pinch-zoom. Unacceptable limitation/bug… period.
Second, It can’t seem to load large PDFs (it gave up on a 47MB PDF I had), not so with DataCase.
Third, while it does support Bonjour, it doesn’t broadcast itself to Macs, which I guess is fine from a security standpoint… BUT there isn’t even an option to enable it. I want to be able to see/access my iPhone immediately as soon as the Mac detects it. DataCase does this flawlessly, Air Sharing on the other hand; you’d have to manually connect to it all the time.
Fourth, Datacase shows you information realtime when it detects files being transferred from the computer to the device. This is extremely useful when you’re trying to see the status of the transfer from the mobile device. With Air Sharing, you have to rely on the desktop to tell you how much files you’ve transferred, etc. because you sure as hell aren’t going to see anything in the application.
Fifth, DataCase can make multiple shared volumes with multiple permissions;_ while not all people would really need this feature, just imagine: creating a volume that only you can access for some personal information (financial, etc. etc.) and another for general files which you can then immediately share with others.
Frankly, there are only two things Air Sharing has that I’d like incorporated to DataCase:
- The cleanliness of Air Sharing’s interface
- The ability to have a scrollbar for PDF document previews 2 Right now, DataCase only has page-up/down buttons… its nice to be able to scrub along a huge PDF document.