The Transporter has always been a consumer focussed product, until now. With the recent arrival of the Transporter Genesis, companies can host up to 24TB of data from their own server, effectively controlling their own cloud. A few years ago I wondered how long it would be before people could create their own cloud hosted data solutions from their own offices. It turns out we didn't have to wait very long at all.
I've heard from a lot of lawyers that want to use iPads for reviewing PDFs but are freaked out by the idea of storing client documents "in the cloud". Yesterday Smile and Transporter announced support in the PDFpen applications for Transporter storage. The result is that now you can store PDFs in your own private Transporter cloud and still access them on the go using PDFpen. Clever.
In the midst of all the hubbub of the last few days, Transporter released version 2.0 of their iOS app now with the ability to upload pictures from your phone or iPad to your Transporter storage. (Katie Floyd writes it up and takes credit all in one post.)
There are increasing numbers of vectors to get photos from iThingies to cloud storage and this is opening a lot of new solutions for the geekier among us. I'm working on just such a system right now and plan to do a Mac Power Users episode on it in the not too distant future.
If you are a Transporter owner, you may want to log in and check out the public beta for the new 2.0 software. It improves the experience several ways:
The new interface is really easy to use with the things you do most often. Creating folders can now be done right in the Finder. Sharing files is a right click away. When you drag-and-drop files and folders to your Transporter folder they will now automatically sync across all of your Transporters with no further setup required. I’ve combined this feature with some Hazel rules to make uploading podcast files a breeze.
No longer do recipients need a transporter account to receive file links. Did you get that? Load a big file on your Transporter, right click, share with anyone. Boom.
You can now limit what content gets placed on your local drive. For instance, if you are putting a big movie library on Transporter, you can keep it off your internal SSD.
This is beta software but I’ve been using it for awhile and had no problems. Moreover, I can’t imagine going back to the version 1 software. I’m spoiled.
If you want to try it out, login to the Transporter management website using your registered email and click the “Desktop & Mobile Software” link on the left side of the page to download the beta 2.0. Learn more here.