Everyone knows that Apple wants to position itself at the leader in the mobile device area, with mobile devices not just being handsets, but any mobile device from tablets (aka iPad) to laptops. But there’s one glaring weakness in this strategy. And that is mobile access.
Many of us have ever-growing iTunes libraries, full of music, movies, and tv shows that we’ve collected over the years. If you have a laptop with a large-enough internal HD, you can take your collection with you wherever you go without worry. But if you’re primary computer is a desktop machine, or you’ve had to resort to moving much of your collection to an external HD, it may not be so easy. There aren’t many ways to access your files remotely, especially if you’re trying to use an iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch to do it.
This week, I tried to get a wireless streaming setup going to watch my movies on my roommate’s 42″ tv. Not having ever tried this before, but knowing that it’s a popular idea, I thought that someone would have created an iPhone app that streams your iTunes library. Unfortunately it wasn’t nearly that simple. As far as I could find, there isn’t really a way to do this simply. The best method I could find is using Remote Buddy‘s AJAX Remote to stream movies. In the end, it works alright, although I had some problems with playing a movie in a playlist with lots of other movies, where it kept playing the wrong movie. I fixed the problem by creating a playlist with only the movie I wanted to watch in it.
But what I thought about while searching for a way to stream my media to my iPhone is that there is also no way (without jailbreaking) to access my files on my computer, unless I use an application like DropBox or iDisk, but those can only access what is specifically put within their reach.
One of the biggest losses to me is that I can’t use Back to my Mac on my iPhone. This seems like a no-brainer thing for Apple to do, they’ve already got the system setup to allow for remote access to a computer, now they only need to add in the ability to access those same computers from your iPhone or iPad. It seems like a relatively simple process to create an application that does this, heck, it’s be a great addition to the iDisk service. Just merge the two, and your current iDisk becomes part of your network of available disks.
Apple is known for having the ability to tie everything together, since they control everything about their products from the hardware all the way through to the software. But this is one area where they have failed to “just make things work”, at least thus far. There is so much potential in finishing tying together all the loose ends. Imagine having access to your entire digital life anywhere you go, as long as you have at least one of your devices with you. In fact, scratch that. As long as you have internet access, you should be able to access your data anywhere in the world. Apple’s done a pretty good job with the iDisk section of me.com, so they certainly have the system in place to do it.