Discover by D-Base Development is the latest addition to the list of file browsing apps available for the iPhone. Discover does everything you would expect in a file browser - but it has a few quirks.
The first advantage that Discover touts over the other apps is that it is 100% free of charge with unlimited upgrades, usage and customer support. Secondly, discover does not require an IP address for usage - everything is done over the bonjour network. These added features however, put a big smile on our faces over here at MAG :)
Phone to Phone File Sharing
Undoubtedly the most impressive feature offered by Discover, is the ability to share files from one iPhone to another wirelessly over wi-fi. It is a seemless process: simply launch Discover, select the iPhone you wish to browse, locate the file and download it to your iPhone. It's that simple!
Access to the Photo Roll
Discover also allows you to browse your Photo Roll or (with the proper previliges) to browse the photo roll of another iPhone on the same wi-fi network. So no more emailing of photos to the person next to you!
Support for Multiple Languages
Discover provides full language for English, French, German, Chinese, and Korean, and more.
Multiple File Formats
Discover supports many different file formats which include:
- Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, and PowerPoint)
- Web Archive (web-page downloads packaged by Safari)
- Web page
- HTML
- Plain text (many different file extensions), with Unicode support
- Source code (C/C++, Objective C/C++, C#, Java, Javascript, XML, shell scripts, Perl, Ruby, Python, and more)
- Movie (standard iPhone formats: H.264, MPEG-4, 3GPP, etc.)
- Audio (standard iPhone formats: MP3 VBR, AAC, Audible, Apple Lossless, AIFF, WAV, CAF, etc.)
- Image (standard iPhone formats: GIF, PNG, JPG, TIFF, etc.)
On the flip side however, these are the quirks we ran into that took the smile off our faces. :(
Advertising
Well, though it's free, the app is ad supported. The ads appear in a bar directly above the 'Up Level' link which makes accidental selection quite easy. This can be quite annoying. You also have to submit your email to 'receive news about Discover' to avoid an annoying pop-up when you launch the app. Also at launch, Discover asks to use your current location. For a file sharing application, this seems quite unnecessary and hence might just be in order to collect statistics for advertising.
File Browsing
Discover only supports HTTP and as such, unlike other file browsers, you cannot access it via Finder or other FTP clients. You can only access your file directory using bonjour on a Mac (through Safari) and as a result you cannot preview files using Quick Look etc. After, uploading a set of files, I decided to move them to another directory, which I found was an impossible task. I ended up deleting them all and then re-uploading. In the same breath, you cannot upload or delete multiple files at once.
Discover definitely has a lot of potential and we're certainly hoping the developers will change certain features in the future! However, they note that they will be bringing social networking features in the future. Er...I'm not so sure. Check out the developer's site here.
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