With up to 32GB on your person, it's annoying that neither the iPhone nor the iPod touch can be used as portable storage. For a few pounds, DataCase adds this capability, so you don't have to carry a USB flash drive around with you. It allows up to 16 volumes to be created, each with their own read and write permissions, and a setting to request confirmation before allowing a connection to be established.
Access to volumes is seamless on Leopard, where the device appears in the Shared list of the Finder's sidebar, while other systems can fall back on manually-established AFP, FTP and HTTP connections. However, the web-based interface doesn't sport the drag-and-drop functionality that's seen in some Web 2.0 applications.
Individual protocols can be disabled in the Settings application, but we'd like the option that prevents the iPhone from going to sleep to be relocated to this application, since it's easy to forget to enable it for long transfers, which amounts to anything that takes over five minutes.
The opening screen gives a graphical and colour-coded breakdown of the space used by different file types and transfers are shown with an arrow to indicate their direction, what's being transferred and how much has been copied. Volumes can be configured and browsed by tapping the large folder in the middle of the screen, and PDFs, Office documents and any other documents that the iPhone can read. The viewer is rudimentary, offering no way to jump to a specific page or bookmark a PDF.
When browsing, files can be filtered by type, but there's no search bar like the one in Contacts to filter by file name, so you have to be well organised. There's no way to share files with other applications either, and that's why we'd rather Apple had implemented file storage on the iPhone.
For volumes that are set to request permission before allowing a connection, a pop-up on the device shows the connecting computer's IP address. This can be turned off, but we'd prefer the ability to pair MAC addresses to DataCase to add an extra layer of privilege to remove pop-ups.
While Veiosoft isn't the only developer to tackle the issue, its wireless approach and avoidance of dedicated uploader applications is an elegant solution. There's room for some small improvements here, but this first version lays a solid foundation for further development. So long as you have access to a wifi network or can create a temporary one on your Mac, DataCase is a great addition to the iPhone.
Author: Alan Stonebridge
DataCase