It’s fascinating to watch people discover new ways of using the iPhone/iTouch. The fun, I’m sure, is only just starting. It’s the first widely-deployed device that has a multi-touch interface. It’s the first mobile device with really good accelerometers in it. It’s the first thing you can drop easily into your pocket that has such a beautiful screen. It has good connectivity and location-based services. It’s really easy to install new applications. And, significantly, it’s the first to combine all of these with a sophisticated GUI and operating system.
Sometimes, though, it’s the simple things that can be the most useful. People have just started realising that you can make your phone into a fileserver on the local network, which means (a) you can transfer stuff to and from your phone without using iTunes if wanted, and (b) you can do it from any machine on the network, not just the one you normally sync with, and (c) you can also just ask your family or colleagues to drop files onto your phone. Do you remember how, in the old days, we would carry around memory sticks that had to be plugged in?
The application I’m playing with, DataCase, appears on your network as an AFP and FTP server, which means you can just open it in the Finder or in Windows, and, as an aside, it makes the contents available over HTTP. Yes, it’s a web server. And we’ve certainly only just started to imagine the full implications of carrying a web server in your pocket…
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