Jun 7, 2011
10 notes

AirDrop

If you’ve cornered me in a bar before, I’ve likely explained my desire for a system to share content among devices on a local network. This has long been a frustration of mine, largely because I keep having conversations with people while out and about where I want to reference various media and content I see online or have isolated on some device that isn’t with me.

Imagine you’re at a bar or out at a park and you’re discussing with a friend an inspiring TED Talk that you’d like to share with her. That topic in turn reminds your friend of this article she read in The New Yorker last week that would complement this video quite well. This could continue over the course of socializing, and by the end, you may have a collection of items you’d each like to share with one another—it’s kind of like the “did you read?” issue at which Portlandia wonderfully pokes, but for any and all types of media. The problem however then is recollecting all of these discussed items later when you’re in front of a device to adequately pass them along.

I’ve been thinking in my head for a bit about a dream iOS application that would solve this problem, allowing me to move content between devices connected locally through P2P WiFi so there would be no required external dependencies. The app would have a sort of blank slate interface by default with the ability to pull content down from various sources: website URLs from an in-app browser or pinboard.in, files from Dropbox, or perhaps even content from iCloud via its APIs. Your friend would also have a copy of this application running on her device. Both devices would be aware of one another through the P2P WiFi and each would thus appear on the other’s at the edge of the slate as a basket, bucket, bin, or pipe or something decidedly more whimsical. You could drag the content from these various sources down onto the blank slate to collect (I’ve wondered what shape the content should take when shown on the slate) and then drag them to your friend’s basket. These files would then wirelessly transfer to your friend’s device so they could peruse over the content with a proper data connection, adequate time, and vested attention. A log would also be created for each transfer with the time, date, location (reverse geocoded address, lat-long, last Foursquare or Gowalla check-in, etc), and the name of your friend’s device, so you could keep a sort of collection of real-world conversations, a sort of Chat History but with real people in real places, face-to-face.

AirDrop which was formally announced yesterday as a part of Apple’s 10.7 Lion OS is the closest I’ve seen to this application. It allows multiple Macs (and only Macs) to share content with one another over a local WiFi connection through the Finder by dragging content onto circles of the other Mac user’s account avatar.

If this were to come to iOS devices which go places computers often don’t—beaches, parks, bars—and took a more skeumorphic approach to its presentation, we’d almost be there.

  1. couch posted this
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Ephemera, thoughts, and curiosities from William Couch (@couch).
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