Being a self-confessed technophile, I tend to pounce upon anything new and slick. While some people feel buyer’s remorse, I feel late-adopter’s regret. My most current pang of regret happened recently when Apple pulled the app NetShare by NullRiver from the iTunes Store. Now I may never be able to tether my laptop to my iPhone. I guess there are greater tragedies in the world.

When I saw that Veiosoft released Datacase, I jumped on it like a 13-year-old Chinese gymnast on a doctored passport. Datacase is an app that lets you transfer files wirelessly to from your computer to your iPhone. Right now I am putting it through its paces.

Once you launch Datacase, the iPhone is available as network accessible computer. My iPhone appears as a local computer. It also makes your files accessible through web and FTP interfaces. In order to transfer files, Datacase needs a wifi signal and to be on the same local network as the computer.  All I needed was to transfer files to the shared volumes (Shared Files, Drop Box) on my iPhone. One minor bug I encountered was that the Shared Files and Drop Box volumes were not visible from a list view in the Finder. I needed to switch to an icon or column view to see them. Once I traversed that relatively small hurdle, I easily uploaded some pictures and an excel file to my iPhone. Datacase also allows the user to view common files types. I opened up my excel document and was treated to this month’s budget numbers.

Datacase Finder View

As a security measure, Datacase requires you to approve of any files sent to your iPhone. However, security isn’t as necessarily tight in the other direction. Since your iPhone is visible on the network when Datacase is running, people with access to your ip address will have access to your Shared Files volume (unless you change the permissions). Be careful not to store anything too incriminating in there. Best leave those files containing state secrets in the Drop Box. Or better yet, don’t put it in Datacase at all. 

Datacase Web Interface

Datacase was a minor lifesaver during a trip to Gettysburg, PA. I forgot my iPhone’s usb cable at home and had no way to transfer an audio tour of Gettysburg battlefield to my iPhone. Remembering my shiny new app, I created an ad-hoc network, assigned some static ip addresses to the iPhone and computer, and I was able to transfer the files like usual.

Datacase does not play DRM-protected files. The audio files play within the Quicktime player, not as part of the iTunes library. So if my audio tour was purchased from iTunes, I would have been out of luck. A great future feature would be to have access to other directories on the iPhone like the iTunes or iPhoto library. Although I’d imagine Apple is a little tetchy about opening those up. Another limitation, albeit small, is Datacase does not let you view Microsoft Office’s newest file type (ex. .docx, .xlsx) and other less standard file types. This limitation is most likely a result of Apple’s built in viewer. I may wait a (long) while for .docx to become the standard. 

Datacase also aggregates files by different file types (i.e. office documents, audio files, photos etc.). I can see this feature being useful once I amass a collection of files, but right now it’s a little superfluous. The great advantage to this app is its ability to share high-use files. I can give my ip address to a coworker and have them download the file from my iPhone. Pretty darn slick. 

Check out Veiosoft’s walkthrough video: