Jeremy’s Little Corner Of The Web…

Brent Simmons has an idea for an app to make it easy to share files between computers:

"If you're in an office or at a conference, making files available to other people can be a pain. Yes, you could use the built-in file-sharing or Apache, but there are too many steps for setting this up - and there are too many steps for people who want to download your files.
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The problem here isn't that we lack file-sharing or web servers or networking: the problem is purely user interface. It's just plain too difficult to access machines that you don't access all the time.
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So I imagine something very much like iChat's Rendezvous buddy list. It would list people - people with files you can download - who are available via Rendezvous. When you select a person, you see a list of files that they've made available. Double-click a file to download it to your desktop. (You might also have a file-centric view instead of a person-centric view. And a search field, of course.)"

This would be really handy… Although, it would be nice to have Bluetooth support in it as well. I don't know if Bluetooth supports anything like that, but it would be nice. (It's also easier if you're not connected to a WiFi network. It's also a pain to setup an ad-hoc WiFi network and get people around to connect to it.)

It would also be nice (although how feasible, I don't know) to have a Windows version of the app. Transferring files between my computer and my flatmate's Thinkpad is a chore. If I could just open up the app on his machine and copy the files over through a simple interface, it would be excellent.

Do I have the time currently to work on it? Not really.

One commenter (rayg) posted a link to Liason, which provides an iTunes-like interface to it. It seems OK, but I imagined something that didn't take up as much space as that. (It also looks like it hasn't been updated in a while.)