FileMagnet

Thanks to Magnetism Studios, I have a copy of the updated FileMagnet (available here).  I went through a two-hour review and testing process and the results are below.  System Specs for the test include Summer 2008 model iPod Touch and MacBook Pro (2.0 Firmware and OS 10.5.4) and a wireless-G connection between the two.

FileMagnet is an iPhone/iPod Touch Application.  For a comparison of FileMagnet and competitor DataCase, please look here.  The application uses Bonjour networking technology to use the iPhone as a wireless hard drive (or flash drive equivalent).  (To learn how to create a network between your iPhone and your Mac, see the Quick Look article on it.  However, if you can access the same WiFi network, you are liable to enjoy more functionality.)  In the current version, it is only compatible with Macs via a separate (free) application download by the same name.  More overview information about FileMagnet can be found at Magnetism Studios.  Now, it’s time to go in depth with File Magnet.

File Transfers

File transfers using the FileMagnet application on the Mac are as easy as drag and drop into the FileMagnet window.  The top half is for files to transfer to the device, and the bottom files that are already on the device.  Also including in the miniscule uploader is the familiar OS X dialogue box for opening files, which achieves the same result as drag and drop.  (this feature is found in the lower left corner under the “plus” sign).  The only other button is a link to the Magnetism Studios help page.

FileMagnet displays the time of your last connection as well, and prompts you to open FileMagnet on the iPhone to start transferring any files that are in the queue.  This is a nice feature to have, as you can just leave FileMagnet up, and drop any files that you might want to have on the go in the uploader.  Then, you can catch them in one fell swoop by simply opening the app on your iPhone.  It’s sort of like syncing.  But not quite.

The iPhone keeps track of the transfer with a status bar at the bottom of the screen, and the Mac companion app does the same, but the iPhone app does not give you an estimated start or finish time or percentage, which isn’t really necessary, but might be nice to have on some occasions, especially when you’retransferring large files, to keep track of the time remaining.
The rate of transfer for your files will depend on the strength and speed of your WiFi connection and the size of the file.  My WiFi is a standard wireless-G home router, and both devices were sitting next to each other.  Their signal strength was about 95% of full.

At this rate, transferring a 3.5 MB MP3 File took less than 10 seconds, just slightly slower than transferring the same file over the USB 2.0 cable to the iPod [Touch] itself.  Most other transfers were comparable, documents taking much less time because of their size.  However, when I went to transfer a larger video file of 140 MB it took 4 minutes and 6 seconds.

This same transfer to a flash drive took 22 seconds.  I would stick to the flash drive if you’re looking for speed for bigger files.  However, since your iPhone will probably have more space than a flash drive (at least for the next few months while flash memory continues to get cheaper, but the iPhone is likely to be updated accordingly) it is nice to have a data transfer app around.

Overall, the File Transfer system is minimal, but that is nice for keeping the desktop clean.  The drag and drop feature is also immensely helpful, it allows your progress to remain unimpeded.  Allowing for files to nest in the Uploader until the iPhone app is activated is also nice for scheduling future data transfers, but it would be even nicer if the Uploader could just automatically start updating the iPhone from a certain set of files or update as you drop, and turn on the device.  This is not limited by FileMagnet, though, and is a result of Apple not allowing programs to background-run in the iPhone OS.   However, I would like to see a little more in the way of keeping track of transfer time as well as how much space is left on your iPod or iPhone: I had no way of knowing if I was going to cross my limits, and an iTunes-style breakup of what’s on the device might be nice, both in the Uploader and on the iPhone its self.

File Viewing

FileMagnet purports to support viewing of Microsoft Office files (.ppt, .xls, .doc), iWork files, JPEG, GIF, TIF, PNG, and iPhone movie files as well as HTML documents and PDFs along with iPhone compatible movies.  I tested one of each (with the exception of iWork files as I don’t have the applications).

M$ Files:

Excel
Excel files are displayed easily in FileMagnet with each column and row being visible, as well as displaying the multiple tabs representing different sheets within the original file.  The display is simple, but effective.  It works in both landscape and portrait mode (new in this update).

PowerPoint
PowerPoint files look sharp on the iPod display, they’re much richer to look at depending on what you’ve got in them, and can also be viewed in landscape or portrait views.  Moving between slides is a simple swipe of the finger, but it doesn’t function quite like the Photos application from Apple.  The swipe merely moves you forward, not to the next page automatically.  It’s less effective this way, I wouldn’t mind that if it were while you were in pinch-and-zoom mode (which is also available on FileMagnet, thankfully), but in normal mode, it’s much less effective, because the slides don’t lock down, nor do they reorient themselves to fit the screen in portrait mode (they do do this in landscape though).

The same is true of all other files in FileMagnet, and is one of my biggest complaints about viewing the files-and it seems like since it works in landscape mode, it shouldn’t be too tough for the boys at Magnetism to fix it in the next update.  Let me be clear, though, you are viewing the slides and not the presentation, the difference being there is no progression, simply flipping through it, which is useful for on the go, and then you can download it wirelessly to your Mac to present it.  (read: lack of animations and transitions).

Word
Word is strange to view.  It functions on about the same level as rich text files, and viewing it on the iPhone (iPod Touch) is comparable to looking at some text written in TextEdit.  But!  You must consider that FileMagnet is simply a viewer and transporter.  It is not an editor.  As such, I can’t really imagine a better way of viewing it, except for displaying it more like PDFs are.  They have the grey space around the pages that makes it easier to tell where the page is and how the document is laid out.  The other item that is missing from the document view is the margins.  It makes it much more difficult to tell where things start or end.  Yet, in PDFs the margins are quite visible.  I was not satisfied with the document viewing in general.

PDFs
As unsatisfied as I was with document viewing, PDF viewing made up for it.  It’s exactly like viewing PDF’s on my Mac, minus the adjustment features.  Landscape view is nice for flipping through documents quickly.  I would still like to see things auto size to the window, and then I could adjust them myself with zoom and pan features that are already inherent in the app.  On the flip side, they, as I said before, do this in landscape view, which makes viewing PDF’s very easy (I prefer to read like that and scan in portrait, because the landscape is wider and I can see more of the page at a higher zoom).
Yes, the entire last sentence was an excuse to use the phrase “on the flip side” to talk about landscape view versus portrait view.

Images:

I tried three types of images, the most common ones to the graphics industry (I’d like to think, and the ones I use the most) including JPG, PNG, and PSD.  The first two are supported by FileMagnet, PSD (Photoshop file with layers, edits, etc) not so much.

JPEG
JPEG files display fine on your iPhone.  They suffer from the same issues in auto resizing issues as the rest of the app, but bar that, it’s nice to be able to preview photos that you may need on another Mac around with you.  One of my biggest issues with iPod and iPhone photos is that you couldn’t take them off your device and put them on another computer.  This way, you can bring your images anywhere and preview them on the go.  However, if you don’t intend to edit these photos or give them to someone else, then I would recommend leaving them in the Photo application, as they’re easier to mess with, and you can email them from there as well (a feature conspicuously missing from FileMagnet, but in the works according to their website).

PNG

PNG files are no different in display, transfer, or working with on the iPhone with FileMagnet.

PSD

PSD files, although not supported, are visible as thumbnails next to the file.  Missing from PSD files is the “>” indicating that it is viewable, which is unfortunate. Which, I figure, if the thumbnail can be displayed, a snapshot of the actual file-similar to Apple’s quick look feature, perhaps-could be displayed on the iPhone. Being a student of Photoshop, I would like to be able to send updates of my latest works to my iPod and then show them to people and take it to perhaps work on at school versus on my MacBook Pro at home.  I’d also love to see support for various other Adobe files like .ai or .indd files, it’d be nice to send, for example, my magazine templates to my iPhone to drag around with me.

HTML
If you’re looking to save web pages to your iPhone and view them on the go, a) don’t be dumb and b) it’s not very useful.  I tried putting the Magnetism Studios site (just the site, none of the resources, and ended up with very little on the screen.  When I included the reference folder, more was visible, but still not nearly enough.  My assumption is that the HTML file is liking wrong when the folder is placed on there, so my rule of thumb is, the simpler the HTML you’re putting on there, the better.  When I tested with some basic HTML I wrote, it displayed fine.  Keep in mind, though, that there’s nothing to that HTML file, and it would be pretty useless to carry around.  My reasoning with telling you not to be dumb is that you have an iPhone, and saving web pages to view on the go is not every practical, as you have the internet at your command.  And it will probably load a better view of the page.

Movies
If you want to carry movies around on your iPhone, I think the Movies application is probably a better choice.  If you’re not a purchaser of the movies on the iTunes store (and I haven’t ever), you probably aren’t worrying about DRM, so you can play them on any Mac with iTunes.  And all Macs supported by File Magnet (i.e., Tiger & Leopard) should have iTunes already installed on them.  So you can watch your movies there anyway.  (the only thing you have to remember to carry is an iPod dock connector cable, so if you can’t carry that, go ahead and store movies on your iPhone via FileMagnet).   It would be much more useful if FileMagnet supported .MOV files so that you could bring them around to watch them.  However, if iPhone itself doesn’t support it, I guess it’d be tough for FileMagnet to do so.

Music
I tested with a simple MP3 file, since it’s the most common to bring around.  FileMagnet supports any music files that the iPhone does, which is most, so it’s easy to store music on your device and listen to it on the go and then transfer it to a computer later, something that it’s possible unscrupulous people would take advantage of, but might also be easier than keeping a separate copy of your music at the office, etc.  The music interface is the same as watching a movie in the regular movies app, but it displays a grey-white QuickTime-esque background while it plays.  If you lock the iPod, then the music continues, but if you close FileMagnet, you won’t be able to keep listening, so be careful.

UI

The user interface of FileMagnet is pretty simple, incorporating drag and drop on the Mac side of things and a very minimal interface on the iPod itself.  Your options are either connect to the computer or disconnect from the computer, look at a list of files, view individual supported files, and delete files.  You can’t mass-delete yet, the app still features an older-Mail-style interface for deleting-swipe right to access it, or tap “edit” in the upper right hand corner.  I’d like to see that updated in the future.  I’d also like to see a display of how much room has been taken up by each file, file type, and how much room is left, which would help me know when I’m overloading and where I can trim things up.  Other than that, the clean interface is nice and simple.  Folders are also supported, and although I didn’t try them, it’s easy to see how they would work.  It’s almost like viewing files in Finder, but not quite.

Problems Encountered

The application quit out no less than three times on me, but restarted again without data loss or other problems.  It was rather annoying though.  It lagged a bit when I first started the large video transfer, but caught up.  Beyond that, there were no big issues.  File transfers are extremely slow on big files, so not fun.

Notes

Make sure that your iPhone and Mac are on the same network before trying to transfer, because you’ll get stopped very quickly, but not before you’ve dropped all your files into the Mac half.  However, once you’ve switched both to the correct network, the files will transfer by themselves, so it’s not a huge deal.
Being locked into having the FileMagnet application on your Mac is obnoxious, because if you don’t have the internet connection to start with, you can’t use the transfer, even though your Mac can create it’s own local wireless network.  So, you can carry the app around with you on a flash drive, which, from my tests, does work, but kind of defeats the purpose of carrying just your iPhone (which is now everything, including your fresh cup of iCoffee, right?) around.

Conclusion

Overall, FileMagnet being the major available application (with competitor DataCase rumored to be out of beta early next week) for wireless data transfers, it does to wireless data transfers like nobodies business.  There are a couple of UI tweaks to be had, including fixing the auto-resizing function in portrait view, as well as (in my opinion) adding support for showing what space is available and what space is taken up.  Finally, I would like to see support for various Adobe program files and viewing, and if possible, the ability to view a full PowerPoint Presentation on your iPhone.   I very much dislike using the computer FileMagnet app.

What I would really love to see more than anything is the porting of FileMagnet over to both Windows and possibly Linux: because, let’s face it, if you’re hauling your data around, you’re likely to be faced with multiple computer platforms at any given point, and if you’re keeping data to transfer on the device, you don’t want to have to wait for a Mac to do so.  I think that DataCase has a good idea in using the iPhone as a mini web server and true wireless drive-so that you can access it through Bonjour, file sharing, and the Finder on the Mac, and through a web browser on a Windows PC, which is similar to accessing Macs or PC’s over a wireless network to begin with.  The iPhone is a very natural extension of that idea, simply becoming another Mac on the network.Other than that, FileMagnet leaves you with a simple UI and is a very functional and highly useful application for the iPhone.

~ by joshuadlwilliams on July 31, 2008.