Mac and iOS: We’ve looked at ways to break down the barrier between your Mac and iPhone in the past, but nothing offers quite the seamless experience you get with DeskConnect. Thanks to a lot of clever tricks, the desktop and mobile apps communicate quickly, reliably, and intelligently so you can move data between devices with ease.
Most desktop-to-mobile data transfer apps fail to do one of the following things: send information reliably, automatically understand the data being sent, offer shortcuts, work with multiple third-party apps, and stay out of your way. DeskConnect manages all of these things with an interface so simple you rarely even see it.
On the Mac side, you install a menu bar app that can send anything with two clicks or a keyboard shortcut of your choice. If you send a Google Map or directions, the mobile app knows to set up a map or directions in your navigation app of choice. The same goes for web sites. DeskConnect doesn’t expect you to stick with Apple defaults. If you prefer Google Maps or Chrome, you can send data there as well.
Sending data back to your Mac works almost as easily but requires a little setup. You have to go through a mildly confusing process to save a bookmarklet to send sites, but once you do it works so well and so quickly that you’ll forget all about it. Sending photos and videos can come from any app, too, as you just need to utilise iOS’ “Open in…” functionality and choose DeskConnect. This makes it easy to transfer files. The only downside is you don’t have easy access to the files themselves. DeskConnect will show them to you, but it hides them in an Application Support folder that isn’t easily accessible.
If you need to transfer data from your Mac to your iPhone and back again, DeskConnect makes the process about as simple as possible and charges you nothing for the service. We’ve seen few first versions of any software work quite so well.
DeskConnect (Free)
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2 responses to “DeskConnect Breaks Down The Barrier Between Your Mac And iPhone”
Looks like a handy app. For free also nice. Except for that golden rule of internet services. “If you’re not paying for the product, then you ARE the product…”
They don’t appear to be running a freemiuim service, so what’s the business model ? How sustainable is it. How are they monetising to run the servers etc ?
All the syncing is done using DeskConnect server as a man-in-the-middle. Meaning they can read anything and everything you send their way between your devices. I haven’t read their privacy policy or vetted them in any way, but I won’t be using this service to send anything sensitive/personal/private/confidential etc.
I’ve been playing with it a bit and it does what it says on the box very nicely. Will be handy for sending Google Maps itineraries to my phone, and other stuff also, esp text from the clipboard (even rich-text) works great.
And if you want to send “typing” from your keyboarded-Mac (iMac/laptop) to your iPhone, I’ve been using Type2Phone for a while now it’s awesome. Costs $5, but it’s worth it to me to be able to use my computer keyboard to type long text into my iPhone (SMS etc…)
Basically anywhere you can enter text into your iPhone, this app lets you type that text seamlessly from your computer keyboard. For many situations would be much faster than using even DeskConnect to get long-form text into your iPhone, as you’re entering LIVE into the text box on the device. (Rather than send, then go into DeskConntect, then copy, then back to app you want text in, then paste)
https://itunes.apple.com/au/app/type2phone/id472717129?mt=12