Hi all, Thought I'd share this with the listers, as it is a very handy app, giving a solution to a problem many of us like to do from time to time. Often, you may want to access audio files using your phone, stored on a computer in my home. As long as you are inside the house, i.e. on your own lan with the iphone, the following app is excellent.
Name is: file browser, by Stratospherics if I remember well. This app gives you instructions on its own website, on how to make files available to the phone, stored on home computers. Then, from the app, you can connect to the computer, browse it, and either download or stream whatever audio you want. The app lets you connect to local network shares, so if you have a windows machine with stuff that you'd like to listen to on your phone while you are at home, then follow the instructions on the website to first make the files available to the lan on the computer in question, and then simply connect and listen with file browser. Same goes if you have a mac with files you want to listen to or download on your phone. But that's not all. The file browser IOS app also has support to let you access a time capsule, so if you have audio, video, text or whatever stored there and you want to listen, view or download that into your phone, you can. A time capsule is neither a mac nor a windows pc, but file browser has support for it, so you can access its stuff just as easily as another network share. So much for internal files on your lan. Also, if there is an ftp server out on the net that you have access to, you can download files from it, and then listen, view etc locally. I used to use an app called ftp pro to access ftp servers and get stuff from them to listen to on my phone, but file browser now does that as well. Even better. If you have dropbox on your phone, file browser has access if you give it. So what I do from time to time, is move stuff from dropbox over to the local machine in my house, disk and folder, where I'd like to store it, to free up space in my dropbox when I need it. Of course you can do these things from your computer, but having the ability to do it from the phone is sometimes handy. As a side note, there is also an IOS app out there for a few dollars, called winzip. That thing can also take stuff from dropbox, and then zip it up and store it back in dropbox. Handy if you have a folder somewhere, that you want to zip and then share to someone using dropbox. I then first use file browser to put the folder into dropbox, from whatever local network share it happens to sit in, and once up in dropbox, I zip it up with winzip, and then use the dropbox app to share the single zip file. I wish file browser could zip as well, but as far as I've seen, it can't for now. Of course, first uploading an entire folder to dropbox takes time and bandwidth. Then, using the IOS winzip app, you are in fact re downloading that folder to the phone, zipping it there, and then re uploading the zip. It is somewhat tedious, but at least it can now be done from our phones. This is especially useful if you have a vpn server running inside your home. There are numerous ways to do that. If you run a vpn server at home on one of your machines, then you can connect to it from outside while you are about somewhere, and to your phone, it will then look as if it is simply part of your local home lan, while in fact you are out and about. So once that vpn connection is up, you can even get to stuff on all your machines from outside on the net. If you have stuff on a drive at home, and you want to put that into your dropbox while you only have your phone at hand, this is one solution. To give you an idea about the app, here's an explanation. Say you want to copy files from a local computer into dropbox. When you open file browser, you get to choose where you want to connect to. This can be a local windows or mac machine, a time capsule, dropbox or an ftp server somewhere. For this example, we choose to connect to our local computer Once connected, you will see your files stored there, and you then can hit a select button at the top of the screen, and then tap the files and folders you want to copy. Next, you tap the file browser toolbar, where you'll find a few buttons: copy, delete etc. Once you hit copy, you return to the file browser start screen, select a new location to connect to, dropbox in our example here, move into the folder where you want to paste, and then hit paste on the toolbar in file browser. The files will then be copied or moved etc. To clarify on how to select, copy and paste: once you are seeing the local folder name you want to copy, you first hit select, then you tap the folder in question, and now that this folder is selected, you hit copy. Then you move into your destination folder, wherever that is, and then you hit paste there. The copy and paste buttons are both in file browser's toolbar at the bottom of the screen. It's easy once you see it in action. >From the file browser start screen, you can also select something called "my >files". This is not a computer you can connect to. Instead, it is local >storage on your phone. So go into it, and hit paste if you want to store files >locally on your phone. The last thing I'd like to tell you is that file browser can download stuff from a url on the net. So, if you know the url of a file you want to download, then paste the url into file browser, and it will get the file from the net. Once in your local storage, you can move it off your phone to any destination you like. I forgot to mention that file browser is fully accessible buy the way. Hth, Paul. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to macvisionaries+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to macvisionaries@googlegroups.com. 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