'Doctape Viewer' Launches for iOS with Support for Over 80 File Types

Cool! I just hope Apple soon finds a creative and useful way to build a file browser into iOS.

filmantopia said:

Cool! I just hope Apple soon finds a creative and useful way to build a file browser into iOS.

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They already have it. It's called the Photo.app. They just refuse to rebuild it to support non jpeg files.

filmantopia said:

Cool! I just hope Apple soon finds a creative and useful way to build a file browser into iOS.

Click to expand...

Unfortunately unlikely. Apple seems to have declared war on the visible file system. Of course the file system is still there it's just that there is more complexity coded in to 'hide' it.

I'm not sure what the use of Doctape is. There are lots of cloud storage options already. Their offer of 5 gb free is fairly standard. What seems different about this app is the ability to convert files on the fly, which might be useful. But for editing, there's a disclaimer:

You need to change something? No problem. Just click on the edit button option in the WebApp and doctape takes you to GoogleDocs.

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So in that case, why not just use GoogleDocs to begin with? It has the same cloud storage capabilities.

The conversion capabilities are what sets this service apart from others (for the actual storage, they actually use Amazon S3). It supports numerous file types that mobile devices normally cannot display or process. Here's a partial list from the app description:

• Microsoft Office files (Word doc/docx, Excel xls/xlsx, Powerpoint ppt/pptm/pptx)
• Open Office (odt, ods, sxw, stw)
• Text-files (rtf, txt, csv)
• Video files (mp4, mkv, mov, avi, ogv, divx , wmv, asf, m4v, webm, mpg, 3gp, 3gs)
• Audio files (mp3, m4a, ogg, aif, flac, ape, aac, wav, wma)
• Image & vector files (jpg, png, tif, bmp, ai, nef, arf)
• Adobe Photoshop files (.psd)
• Adobe PDF files (.pdf)
• Zip archive files (.zip)

Razeus said:

They already have it. It's called the Photo.app. They just refuse to rebuild it to support non jpeg files.

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It supports other formats, technically.

That is it will convert them to jpeg if you are syncing them from your computer but things in the camera roll (i.e. Photos from camera, things saved from web), while saved as IMG_####.jpg can be png/gif/etc. Case in point: Animated gif files downloaded from mobile Safari will not play, but if imported to computer (or imported into a "gif player app") the animation works fine (even though it is saved as .jpg).

Although it is possible that they convert it to jpg on-the-fly or keep a separate cache copy as jpg for viewing in the photos app, in which case some of what I said wouldn't (exactly) pertain to your statement.

ValSalva said:

Unfortunately unlikely. Apple seems to have declared war on the visible file system. Of course the file system is still there it's just that there is more complexity coded in to 'hide' it.

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And this is a good thing. I would venture to say that 99.9% of the people with iOS devices have no use for this. Furthermore the complications with dealing with technical issues from manually modifying files and their locations would be a nightmare.

hexor said:

And this is a good thing. I would venture to say that 99.9% of the people with iOS devices have no use for this. Furthermore the complications with dealing with technical issues from manually modifying files and their locations would be a nightmare.

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Jolly Christ, how do computers work?
How do people survive? How do Android users not fall on the ground shivering in the public, because they forgot where they put their family photos of last weekend?

I'm amazed, surely iOS users must be a kind of different form of living creatures or something...

Glassed Silver:mac

hexor said:

And this is a good thing. I would venture to say that 99.9% of the people with iOS devices have no use for this. Furthermore the complications with dealing with technical issues from manually modifying files and their locations would be a nightmare.

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Agreed. As long as they don't do this to the Mac we'll be good

There are many ways to do this if you want to.

I use FileBrowser and have a mirrored file tree setup on my iPad complete with shortcuts and symbolic links - both local to the iPad structure and also back to the Mac itself via wireless. On Dropbox I have a subset of this. FileBrowser also natively will open all sorts of files (ppt, word, excel, video etc)

Essentially because of the way IOS treats files (mapped to apps), this structure is more of a staging and reference area - and not always used.

A typical scenario would be to finish a ppt - send it to DropBox (or directly to FileBrowser via wireless), pull it into FileBrowser and leave it there in the structure. I can open it native or into the Keynote IOS app ....and on and on.

IOS is not inherently meant to treat files that way but there are always work-arounds.

Rgds,