Reading about the new release of OS X, they mentioned something called AirDrop: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AirDrop_%28OS_X%29
That seemed remarkably similar to what we've had for a long time with "People nearby", so I decided to have a look at it and see how it works in practice and if it could be made more visible and easier to use. Because that does seem like a very useful feature. The first thing I did, was to open the contact list and right click a local contact. Sure enough, there was a menu option to send a file to that contact. That might be how I would do this, but other users might find it more intuitive to send the file from the file manager. So I opened Nautilus, selected a file and chose Send To from the context menu. There is an option to send the file as an instant message using Empathy and I can choose contacts, including "People nearby". However, there is no easy way to see which contacts are nearby and which are normal IM accounts or what protocols they use. Since "People nearby" are special contacts, I believe it would be a usability improvement if those would have its own option in the send to dialog. That is to say: Send to > People nearby > select contact. I filed a bug which is available here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nautilus/+bug/813541 I wasn't actually able to send files that way though. On both ends, I was told that the sender aborted the transfer, which I obviously didn't. I've talked to people in #Telepathy, showed them the logs from both machines, and they could not find a reason for this, but confirmed that it should just work. If you have two Ubuntu desktops in your LAN, it would be nice if you could try this yourself and see if you're able to do this. Perhaps if we can find some scenarios where it does work and other where it doesn't, then it might be possible to figure out why. Thanks. Jo-Erlend Schinstad -- ubuntu-desktop mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-desktop
