Share Files With A Simple Drag And Drop And Click

Thanks to Apple, we live in an era of think different. Take file uploading as an example. It’s not that uploading a file is difficult. It’s usually point and click.

The number of ways to upload files, share files, and the number of places to send those files makes the uploading process more cumbersome and troublesome. Fortunately, someone is thinking different. Complexity, meet simplicity. Troublesome, meet easy.

How Many Ways To Skin A File Sharing Cat?

You know that uploading and file sharing has gone mainstream when your mother can do it. Flickr, YouTube, email attachments, MobileMe, and many other apps have multiple ways to share multiple file types.

Files, documents, PDFs, photos, images, movies, music.

Whatever it is there are twenty eleven ways to get files from here to there. That’s the problem. There’s no single way. It’s many ways. Every app has a different sequence, different buttons, a different process to upload or share.

It’s not that any of the methods are overly complicated. It’s just that there are many ways. Let’s try something different.

Not Your Mother’s File Sharing App

Courier is a brand spanking new way to upload files of all kinds. Why? Because there are so many ways to upload files. There’s FTP. SFTP. WebDAV. Amazon. Flickr. YouTube. Vimeo. MobileMe. Facebook, and others.

This new app presents a simple, straightforward, non-technical way to move files from your Mac to those services without learning a different way for each, using different buttons, remembering different methods.

Courier starts with a decidedly old fashioned metaphor. Stamps and envelopes.

Create an envelope for what you want to send—photos, movie clips, documents, PDFs, files, images, music, whatever. Stamps represent the various services you want to send your stuff to—from FTP and SFTP to Amazon and Flickr. From YouTube to Vimeo, and Ember to Facebook.

Then, drag and drop the files, images, photos, music, movie clips, PDFs, or whatever you’re sending, directly onto the envelope. Then click the Deliver button and Courier delivers what’s inside to where it’s supposed to go.

Once you set up Courier, the whole process of moving what you have to where you want it to go is drag and drop and click. Fast and easy.

Courier comes with seven built-in plugins which act as the destination packages. FTP/SFTP, Amazon S3, Flickr, Facebook, Vimeo, YouTube, Ember.

Easier Said Than Done

As easy as Courier is to get files from here to there without fuss, bother, or much effort, there are a few caveats. The envelope metaphor is a breeze to figure out, but it’s incomplete.

First, there’s no MobileMe destination option, an odd omission for a Mac upload app.

Second, there’s no option for email, which is a very common way to send files from the list above. Without some email connection, there’s yet another way to worry about sending files.

Finally, there is that nagging setup requirement. Though it’s easy enough, many Mac users are not familiar with WebDAV or Amazon S3 or the typical requirements to connect to each of the services. They’re not difficult setups, but not common.

Courier boasts a number of other time saving features, including an automatic way to shorten those long and cumbersome URLs. The upload history is captured in a log. Logins are secure bookmarks. And Courier is integrated into OS X’s Services menu.

You’ll love the Courier interface. It’s a joy to use. Even better is the end result graphic which displays a map of the world, a pin for your location, and a pin in the map for the envelope’s destination, and a progress bar. That’s slick.

I wonder how the folks at Zevrix Solutions feel about a competing app named Courier which does what their app—named File Courier—does. Uh oh. Oh, well. What’s in a name? Can you say iPhone?