#IOS DESKCONNECT ALTERNATIVE FOR MAC#
#IOS DESKCONNECT ALTERNATIVE ZIP FILE#
#IOS DESKCONNECT ALTERNATIVE MAC#

The developers have said that DeskConnect also allows you to right-click a phone number in the Contacts app and click a button to initiate a phone call on your iPhone remotely, but I have not been able to get that function to work. Highlighting a file in Finder and clicking the menu bar icon offers a similar option, as do websites in Safari, and so on. For example, which working in Pages for Mac, clicking on the DeskConnect icon in the menu bar will reveal an option to send your current document to one of your other devices.

#IOS DESKCONNECT ALTERNATIVE MAC#

One very cool feature of the Mac app is that it can detect which app you’re working in and figure out if there are any relevant files that can be shared. Clicking the notification opens the file in Quick Look and allows you to save it to your hard drive (via the sharing button on the Quick Look window, which is unfortunately not very obvious). Like the iOS app, it can receive push notifications for new files even if it isn’t running at the time. However, the Mac app is still fairly solid. It quickly got old and definitely made me wish I had decided to use email instead. When sending the screenshots for this very review to my Mac, I had to locate each one separately and wait for it to send before I could send the next one. You can’t select multiple photos to share to your Mac at a time. Sending any other kind of file will require proper sharing support in whatever app you use to handle those files (for example, to share a Pages document, you have to use Pages for iOS to send the file to DeskConnect).Īnother reason going to this direction is a bit more difficult is lack of batch photo uploads. The DeskConnect app on iOS supports sending photos, websites from Safari (or Chrome), and plain text from your device’s clipboard. This is supported in a variety of apps, including iWork, but some app developers choose to design their own file sharing sheets instead, in which case they would need to specifically include DeskConnect support. DeskConnect will appear as an option on that sheet and allow you to quickly send your files to other devices. While third-party apps do not need to directly integrate with DeskConnect, they do need to use the “Open In…” sheet that you may have seen in Mail and a few other apps. Going the other direction-from iOS to Mac-can be a little more frustrating for several reasons. I suspect this is a bug rather than a deliberate design choice, but it’s still a big problem to have to work around.

#IOS DESKCONNECT ALTERNATIVE ZIP FILE#

Normally most apps can unzip these archives without any issue, but not only does DeskConnect not open them, it doesn’t let me send them out to other apps that I know can open them (even though Mail allows me to send the same zip file to other apps). I zipped up a few images and sent them to my phone.

Unfortunately, the app seems to have a hard time with some other file types. Some examples include Pages or a photo editor. You can also pop files out into a different app to continue working with them. Tapping the notification brings you into the DeskConnect app for iOS where you can view the file (if it’s one of a few standard types, such as an image or iWork file). I force-quit the app from the multitasking tray and still received an immediate push notification when sending a file to my phone. You don’t have to start the app on your iOS device at all. Once you’ve dropped a file, it is immediately transferred to your iPhone or iPad.

#IOS DESKCONNECT ALTERNATIVE FOR MAC#

DeskConnect for Mac sits in your menu bar and waits for you to drop files onto it. That’s where DeskConnect comes in. DeskConnect is an pair of apps for iOS and Mac that avoids all of the unpleasantness of connecting the two devices and allows you to seamlessly send files from one to the other.įirst lets talk about getting files onto your phone from your Mac. It’s not seamless and it’s not as effective as it could be. There are also a ton of apps that allow you to connect to your phone through a web browser to transfer files, but those require the app to be running on your phone, and for the app to be in a specific mode to receive the files. For email I have to select all the images from my Camera Roll and either mail them five-at-a-time from the photos app, or copy them, switch to Mail, paste them into a message (which somehow bypasses the absurd five-image limit on in-line sharing in the Photos app) and then address the message to myself and wait for it to send, then wait for it to arrive on my computer. Using a Photo Stream requires me to open iPhoto on my Mac, which means it will probably take forever just to grab a few images. In the past I have used Photo Streams or email to get the images from my phone to my Mac, but both of those are a little more annoying than they need to be. This is especially true with things like screenshots for reviews. From time to time, I find myself needing to send some files from my Mac to my iPhone, or from my phone to my computer.

Ios deskconnect alternative