Latest App Store purchase: Air Sharing Pro
History
Probably long after everyone else heard about it, I got wind that Air Sharing Pro had been released by the good people at Avatron. I've always preferred Air Sharing (the regular version), feeling that other file sharing applications just fell short.
Take for instance File Magnet: this is one of the first apps of this kind (correct me if I'm mistaken), but it made the error of forcing the end-user to install a desktop program to be able to send and retrieve documents to/from the iPhone. When the product was just released only a Mac client was available. In my opinion, Air Sharing felt the most robust of all.
What's new?
The only problem I had with the regular version is that it used the built-in iPhone PDF viewer, which is clearly not designed to open large, resource-intensive PDF files. Product manuals weighing several megabytes caused a few problems from time to time. Not so with the Pro version: Avatron has created an in-house developed PDF version, which can easily handle such documents (although there's only so much it can do with a limited amount of memory of course). But that's far from the only change between the regular and the Pro version. Here's a small list of things that are new or have been improved:
- Email files (uploads to free drop.io server)
- Print documents
- Basic file operations (rename, delete, create folder, ...)
- Access to remote volumes (MobileMe iDisk, FilesAnywhere, MyDisk.se, Generic WebDAV servers)
- Zipping and unzipping of files
- Supports password-protected and encrypted PDFs
- Advanced auto-detection of character encoding in text files
- Easy file sharing between Air Sharing users on the same WiFi network
Everyone makes mistakes, and bugs are prone to happen. Such is the case with version 2.0, where I've been able to spot two bugs:
- PDFs are rendered incorrectly if the first page of your PDF has different dimensions than the rest of your document (e.g. the book's cover as an image). This can be solved by removing the first page.
- The "Sort by kind" setting in the File Browser is ignored.
The bugs have already been reported to the developers and a fix should be available in the next release.
Pro version? Why?
Some users are a bit upset that they have to pay twice to get the additional features that differentiate the Pro from the regular version. CEO Dave Howell has been kind enough to explain the reasoning behind it:
We love our early adopters, whether they got Air Sharing for free, as over 80% did, or bought it. You guys are awesome! And your suggestions and enhancement requests are extremely valuable, which is why we have this suggestions forum.
Soon after releasing Air Sharing, we planned to have two versions: Air Sharing and Air Sharing Pro. Air Sharing would feature a file server and a file viewer. Pro would add Printing, Emailing, access to remote file servers, a custom PDF viewer, zip & unzip, and a host of other features. And we planned to price them at $5 and $10.
But we also wanted to offer a $5 paid upgrade for Air Sharing users. Unfortunately, Apple has not yet added a mechanism for paid upgrades to the App Store. So we decided to simulate such a mechanism, by offering Air Sharing Pro for only $5 for a brief period. It's something of a blunt instrument, this method, because we have to offer everybody the $5 price, not just current Air Sharing users. But that's okay. If a universal discount is what it takes to reward our customers, that's what we're doing!
So in effect, if you bought Air Sharing for $5, you can get Air Sharing Pro for $10, which is its regular price. If you got the classic version for free, you get Pro for $5, a Right Bargain. If you bought Air Sharing for $7, you'll have paid a total of $12 for Pro.
I hope this clarifies things. One other point: we also fixed some bugs in Air Sharing Pro that we do plan to fix in Air Sharing. For example, we made enhancements to the UI, made the PDF viewer much more stable, added support for viewing iWork '09 documents (as long as they're saved With Preview), Our intent is NOT to make people pay for bug fixes. We absolutely plan to roll those bug fixes back into the classic version of Air Sharing as soon as possible. This would already have happened had we not gotten ensnared by the sudden requirement to support iPhone OS 3.0 before Apple will approve apps. But it will happen soon.
Best regards, and thanks for your support.
Dave Howell
Avatron Software, Inc.
Conclusion
It's great. 'Nuff said ;-)
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