We have seen an abundance of services pop up in the past few years that promise a way to share our files with ease and speed. Most of the times, all we want to do is share a file from one of our devices to the other. In such a scenario, going through the painful process of uploading it to such services or emailing it to yourself and then re-downloading it again on the other device seems like an overkill and is painfully slow and time consuming. Apple kinda solved that problem when it introduced OS X Lion. Lion came with a unique feature called ‘AirDrop’ that allowed you to share files between computers without involving the Internet as a mediator. The result was a super fast way to transfer your files effortlessly. Instashare is a gorgeous new app that allows you to do just that, but between your iOS devices and/or your computers. It’s basically AirDrop for iOS and OS X!
On launching Instashare for the first time, you’ll be greeted with a short tutorial explaining how it works and a way to download its Mac counterpart. Once you download and install the Mac application, you’re ready to go! The app is basically divided into 3 sections. The first section displays a list of files that you can share. These include the files that you have transferred using the Mac application or added via the “Open in” feature of iOS. The second section shows you all the albums and photos in your photo library and the third section is the settings panel from where you can choose to enable or disable sound, read the FAQ, download the desktop app or buy the in-app purchase to remove ads. Now, the actual way to share is just brilliant! All you need to do it press and hold the file (or photo) and it will show you a list of devices. You have to merely drag the file to that device, drop it and you’re done! The device you selected will receive a prompt to accept the file and the transfer is complete within seconds. The speed at which it transfers even large files is blazing fast owing to its reliance on Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0. It holds true to its name of “instant” share and that alone makes it worthy of deserving a place on your home screen. The Mac app will stay on your OS X Menu bar, so it’s always accessible and works exactly the same way!
Instashare features a very slick and clean user interface. The familiar drag & drop gesture that we’re so used to on our computers makes the experience highly intuitive and quite pleasant. The free version is ad supported and quite frankly, the ads ruin the beautiful design. I highly recommend you to buy the in-app purchase and get rid of those ads.
Instashare is available for Free on the App Store. It’s unique, there’s no worthy alternative to it and it would honestly save you a lot of trouble in times of need. Just go get it already!