- What Exactly Is AirDrop?
- Taking Care of the Preliminaries
- Enabling the AirDrop Receiver
- Transferring Content Between iDevices
- Transferring Content Between a Mac and iDevice
- Final Thoughts
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Transferring Content Between a Mac and iDevice
Sending media between your iDevice and your Mac is super easy. First, open AirDrop on your Mac by opening the Go menu and selecting AirDrop from the list, as shown in Figure 7.
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Figure 7 AirDrop is a built-in app in OS X Yosemite.
You'll note by examining Figure 7 that you can set the discovery scope in the OS X AirDrop app the same way you can do so on an iDevice. Again, I recommend using "Everyone" and then disabling AirDrop once you've completed your transfers.
To transfer from an iDevice to your Mac, access the Sharing menu of the source app as usual and select the user logged on to the OS X computer. As shown in Figure 8, in which I share a Web page from my iPhone to my iMac, the content transfers to the Mac immediately, without displaying the Accept/Decline prompt. Frankly, I'm not sure if this behavior is by design or represents a bug in Airdrop.
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Figure 8 I was a bit taken aback when the Web page from my iPhone suddenly loaded on my iMac with no Accept/Decline prompt.
On the other hand, I noticed that the OS X Yosemite Notification Center did inform me whenever I sent a photo to my Mac. Inconsistent behavior, indeed.
To perform the AirDrop transfer operation in reverse, simply drag the appropriate resource into the OS X AirDrop window, on top of your target.
In Figure 9, I dragged a PDF file onto my iPhone's user account and momentarily saw the Accept/Decline prompt shown in Figure 10.
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Figure 9 Transferring a file via AirDrop in OS X Yosemite is a drag-and-drop operation, as usual.
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Figure 10 The iPhone asks me if I want to accept or decline the PDF that I sent from my iMac desktop computer.