By John Greenash.
Airdrop is a new feature built into OS X Lion to easily facilitate the transfer of data between two computers wirelessly without any configuration necessary.
How often do you find yourself sitting in the office and needing to share a file with a colleague?
Do you ask your colleague to turn on personal file sharing and copy it to their drop box?
Do you connect to a file server then email them the path to the location?
Or do you pull out your trusty USB stick and manually take the file over to them?
With Airdrop, all the above is no longer necessary.
- Simply open a Finder window,
- select Airdrop from the left hand menu
- and instantly see any user’s in range who also have Airdrop open.
- Drag the file to their icon and it will prompt them to accept.
- Once they do, close down the menu and carry on working.
The great thing about Airdrop is you don’t even need to be connected to the same wireless network. In fact, you don’t need to be connected to any network at all for this to work.
Airdrop will only work with Mac computers running Mac OS X Lion and the following hardware
- MacBook Pro (Late 2008 or newer)
- MacBook Air (Late 2010 or newer)
- MacBook (Late 2008 or newer)
- iMac (Early 2009 or newer)
- Mac mini (Mid 2010 or newer)
- Mac Pro (Early 2009 with AirPort Extreme card, or Mid 2010)
To view how to enable Airdrop via Ethernet on unsupported Mac’s, view Richard’s previous Blog post.