While I did some research for another article I came across iGet Mobile from Nakahara Informatics, Inc. I neither heard of this software nor the company before, but I liked the features and so I tried it out (free trial available at the website).

iGet Mobile is basically a web-server that makes all your Mac's hard disks and network shares available, so you can access them on any other Mac, Windows PC, iPhone, iPod Touch and probably also on other mobile phones with a web browser.

Setting up the server is very simple, you just need to enter a user name and password. After that just click on Start Server. That's it.

Well so far nothing too special, you can do something similar with the Apache Server on OSX. I'll show how it looks on an iPhone/iPod Touch. It's looks very similar from a Mac or Windows PC.

From an iPhone/iPod Touch:

iGet Mobile shows the web address you need to enter into any webbrowser. If you have a variable IP address you can configure it, so that it sends an email on each start with the current IP address, or you can use DynDNS.

When you now access your Mac you'll notice, all folders and documents have the same icons as on the Mac.
When you access a file you have usually 3 options:

• View
  Works for all documents the iPhone/iPod Touch can view, but the iPhone/iPod Touch can be quite slow with large documents.
  It does not seem to support Audio/Video Streaming, I tried some MP3s and MP4s.
• Convert to PDF
  For all documents (also MP3s...), but still very useful for documents, also those the iPhone/iPod Touch can't view, i.e. OpenOffice etc.
• Send via Email (optionally compressed as .zip file)
  You can sent files with less than 10 MB to any email account, but you need to configure your email server on the Mac first.

Summary

This is a great and easy to use application for the Mac. If you're often on the road and need access to your documents at home, this is just right for you.

I noticed some problems with media files: I couldn't open MP3s, MP4s on the iPhone/iPod Touch. I also couldn't open my iPhoto library, so to access your photos you need to store them outside your iPhoto library.

You also need to remember to leave your Mac switched on! If it's off you can't access it...

Pricing

Regular price: US$ 39 (at the moment a special offer for US$29)
Free trial available, server stops automatically after a few hours.
Requires Mac OSX 10.5 (Leopard) or higher

Comments

Add New Search RSS

Write comment
Name:
Email:	do not notifynotify
Website:
Title:
UBBCode:	-color-aquablackbluefuchsiagraygreenlimemaroonnavyolivepurpleredsilvertealwhiteyellow -size-tinysmallmediumlargehuge

Powered by !JoomlaComment 3.26

3.26 Copyright (C) 2008 Compojoom.com / Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved."