App Store Review: File Magic
13 11 2009
The iPhone is a powerful tool. As app developers get more creative, it’s slowly displacing all the other stuff we’re used to carrying around. It started with the iPod and PDA, then moved on to our handheld gaming devices and portable DVD players, and now it’s eliminating the store loyalty cards from our wallets and the car keys from our pockets.
Another entirely natural target, even in the days when iPhones and iPod touches held just a few gigabytes, has been the humble flash drive, and File Magic aims to make it obsolete.
SpashData’s $2.99 (at the time of writing) File Magic product consists of an iPhone app which runs on iPhone OS 2.1 and up (including the iPod Touch) and a desktop companion which is supported on Windows XP and Vista and Mac OS X 10.4.11 and up. It’s easy to add, manage, and delete files through the desktop application and I had no connectivity issues during my two-week trial of File Magic.
While the desktop companion does make managing files from your home computer relatively painless, it puts some distance between File Magic and other forms of portable storage. Flash drives, portable hard disk drives, and even floppy disks all work on modern operating systems with no drivers or add-ons. File Magic does not, and if I want to quickly dump a file or two onto a friend’s computer, I do not want to spend time downloading and installing software, and I doubt that my friend (or the local librarian or school administrator) would take kindly to the idea either.
Other iPhone file managers don’t have this limitation and offer FTP, WebDAV, or web browser-based access to files. For me, WebDAV and plain HTTP are the perfect combination: I can mount the phone in the Finder for bulk uploading and file management, or load it in a browser to quickly upload or download a file or two. And, you know what? Aside from being noticeably slower than a flash drive, that model works. But File Magic can’t do it.
File Magic has other quirks. It organizes files into categories: documents, music, video, images, email, others, and folders. I can’t find much of a point to this, as it puts an extra tap between me and my files. I can make my own folders, and if I don’t it probably means that I’m happy with all my files in one big list, just like every other storage medium. File Magic also has a splash screen, which abuses the iPhone OS’s loading image feature intended only to display a minimal rendering of the application while it’s starting up. The interface is confusing, glitchy, and outright broken in places, but does get the job done if you’re willing to look past the bugs.
There are some features that makes this app stand out from others in its domain. In addition to transferring files to and from computers, File Magic can transfer between devices running the app. I wasn’t able to test out this feature. It can email your files too, and while this feature could use a lot of polish (the interface for composing messages is rough and separate emails are sent for every file), it works just fine.
File Magic also includes a couple of features which are entirely unrelated to its main purpose but could be useful. There’s an “Import Address Book” button in the desktop application that dumps the iPhone’s contacts to a CSV file. You can compose emails in a minimal interface and transfer them to the device for later sending. The emails can’t be edited and disappear from File Magic the first time they’re used (even when you don’t send them), so as it stands the drafts folder on an IMAP or Exchange account is far better suited to holding half-finished emails.
In the end, it’s a solid choice for toting your data around. I’ll probably stick with Air Sharing — it’s more polished and doesn’t require (or even have) an application running on my desktop — but File Magic offers many more features, and a lower price. That alone might give it the edge, for some.
Disclaimer: We received a review copy of File Magic which inspired and was used in the writing of this article.
Categories : Apple
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