PreCentral: Wirelessly dig through your TouchPad's files with WiFi File Sharing

[News Reporter]

There are a great many things you can do wirelessly with the HP TouchPad - heck you can charge the darned thing without plugging it in. But transferring files from your desktop computer to the tablet has always involved either a giving a song-and-dance performance to appease the cloud syncing gods or just plugging in with a Micro-USB cable. We at webOS Nation do a lot of screencapping, and we've taken to just emailing the shots to ourselves as the fastest and simplest method to get the images back-and-forth.

"The line must be drawn here! This far, no farther!" said homebrew developer ShiftyAxel -

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. So he whipped up a Samba installer for webOS and put together a the cunningly named app WiFi File Sharing. The app, currently available in the , when opened turns your TouchPad into a local network drive accessible by your computer. Simple as that.

Out-of-the-box, WiFi File Sharing is set up to allow access to a newly-created Public folder, though with just a few taps in the Preferences pane you can allow access to the entirety of your USB drive and boot partitions. That's not just browsing access - WiFi File Sharing mounts your TouchPad as a fully-accessible network drive, complete with read and write privileges. All you have to do is have WiFi File Sharing open and in the foreground ("maximized") to maintain the connection. Toss the app away and the connection is automatically terminated.

Ideally your computer should be able to automatically the TouchPad right off the bat after installing and launching, but there's always room for finickiness. This is why we're beginning the migration to tablets as everyday devices - they're just nowhere near as finicky. Anyway, on first launch we couldn't get our Mac to notice that there was a fun new network drive to play with. But directing our file browser to connect to the server (Go > Connect to Server… (no password) on a Mac, Start > Computer > Map Network Drive for PC) solved the issue handily.

Now we're wirelessly slinging files back and forth through the ether, and we find ourselves agreeing with ShiftyAxel - . Sure, it's a an advanced feature, but it'd be there to supplement the cloud and cabled options. Either way, and are available now through our Homebrew Gallery, . Go download it. Now.