SpotCha! Searches Your Mac From Your iPhone
SpotCha! ($2.99) by SpotCha! is an app trying to carve out a niche in the already competitive productivity market.
SpotCha! allows you to remotely log in to your Mac and make use of Spotlight. You can view a whole host of files or music and save them to your iPhone. So far it seems Microsoft Office .docx, .xlsx, and .pptx files are not supported, though the developers promise an update to correct that.
The app taps into Spotlight on your Mac. It will bring up the top hits that would be returned as if you had entered the search directly on the Mac.
Set up is easy enough. First you’ll need to configure your desktop app with a username and password. You’ll want to make your password complex enough that others can’t hack into your system. Then you log in to the app with the same authentication.
The iOS version of the SpotCha! app costs $2.99. It also requires a free download of the SpotCha! Desktop app. Before even downloading the iOS app, you’ll need Snow Leopard, so Leopard users are out of luck.
How functional is this? I would think that your iPhone and Mac being synced would mean your music library would already be on your phone. Documents can be transferred via iTunes, emailing them, or other apps like FileApp can do the same thing.
Granted, all of the previous methods are local solutions. If you didn’t happen to sync a certain file or song and you needed it right at the moment, then SpotCha! would work. However, any file pulled from SpotCha! is read only.
Even though it has not made its grand entrance yet, iCloud will likely eradicate any need for remote logging on to your Mac.
