Well, twas the night before iTwin, and all through the house, not a small file was stirring, not even my mouse. Suddenly, iTwin arrived, and small files were stirring. Setup, indeed, was easy. Stick the combined two devices into the desktop. Double-click the icon in the window that opens, and off she goes installing quickly. To complete the install at the end of the process, pull the device back out, then immediately reinsert, and voila, she loads, putting round icons of both the hardware device itself and a green icon that when clicked opens up a window into which you drag your files to share. Leaving the first half of the iTwin device plugged in, you remove the second half to take with you on the road. You can plug this second twin piece of hardware into any USB drive on any computer with broadband Internet access. You install iTwin software on the remote computer, the same as originally on your desktop. After software finishes install process, you pull out the device and replug right back in. The device loads a round icon of the device itself and two other round icons, one green, one orange. The green icon is your remote computer. The orange icon is the window showing the shared files of the desktop computer you left at home. Cool. Simple. Easy. What’s not to love?
Well, I wound up returning the device. Why? You cannot avoid the inescapable reality that, even with broadband access, your access to files is only at wifi speeds, which is slow, to be honest. Now, a few jpg picture files? Sure. Of course. A Word document with text only? Sure. No problem. But a Keynote presentation with embedded video? Forget it! I had forgotten to put a Keynote presentation I needed to edit on Dropbox, so I tried to access the file with iTwin. Took a full 3 minutes for the iTwin even to calculate the amount of time to transfer the file over to me. Then, iTwin informed me I would have to twiddle my thumbs for another 47 minutes before that file would see the light of day on my remote computer! Oh, yes. The file was huge, I admit, to the tune of 283 MB. Like I said, embedded videos and lots of images. Unfortunately, multimedia is what I am all about. The sweet little iTwin device is not anywhere near robust enough for multimedia access. Not even close. And you can forget trying to edit a file through iTwin that you simply double-click to open up. Same problem. You wait 45 seconds just to get inside a text box on a slide in Keynote.
So, little iTwin is being returned. No Santa Claus at this address.
