TextGuru

Ever since I bought my lovely iPhone 3G, I’ve only really missed one thing about my Nokia N95: the ability to easily put files on the ‘phone, so that I can email them later. I don’t need to do this often, but when I do it tends to be quite important, in a ‘copy is missing, and it’s half past four on the day before it’s due to run’ sort of a way.

At long bloody last, this bog standard feature has arrived courtesy of TextGuru. The app has garnered quite a bit of attention thanks to it being a rather well-designed, easy to use text editor, one that includes the holy grail of missing iPhone features: cut and paste. I’m not terribly excited by the text editing features, to be honest—if I want to write and edit text, I’ll do it on something with a keyboard (though I’m fairly sure I’ll be writing longer emails in TextGuru before too long).

Anyway, here’s how to get a text file from your computer to your iPhone, then email it to your irate boss.

1. Install TextGuru on your iPhone (at the time of writing it costs 59 pence).
2. Download, install and launch the TextGuru File Share application for your Mac.
3. Find the file you want, and copy it to the TextGuru folder (you’ll find an alias to it in your Documents folder, it’s really in ~/Library/Application Support/TextGuru/Files).
4. Launch TextGuru on the iPhone
5. Click on the File Shares button
6. Click on ‘TextGuru FileServer’
7. Click on the name of the file you copied to the TextGuru folder a moment ago.
8. Click on the Download File button.
9. Click on the Documents button.
10. Click on the name of your file.
11. Click on the little ‘i’ button.
12. Click on ‘Send via Email’.

The technical term for all that is ‘a bit of a faff’, even if you discount the first two steps as one-time affairs. But I’m still really very grateful to the TextGuru developers for giving me a feature that Apple should’ve included from the off.

Posted at 6pm on 10/09/08 by Jack Mottram to the mac category.
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Tags: applications, iphone, osx