Chris Hamady

Last evening, after arriving home from the SITE 2011 conference, I was excited by the prospect of being able to update all of my iOS devices (iPod touch, iPad, iPhone) to iOS 4.3. My main reason for wanting to do so, was the awesome upgrade to Home Sharing included in this new release. For as long as I've had an iPhone and an iPad, I've wondered why users of iOS-based devices couldn't stream their iTunes content from their computers to their Apple mobile devices.

Once Home Sharing credentials are entered on your iPhone or iPad, any iTunes media stored on a computer with Home Sharing enabled, can be streamed to any iOS device when both devices are on the same wired/wireless network. Seeing that all of my media content is stored on a single computer (more info on that here), I wanted to be able to have access to it WIRELESSLY! After months and months of requesting this feature, I was now looking forward to finally getting to try it out.

The first thing that I did was backup all of my iOS devices. Detailed information on how to do that can be found here:

http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1414

Next, I began the process of upgrading all of my iOS devices to iOS 4.3. This is accomplished by syncing your iPad, iPod touch or iPhone with iTunes and then clicking the "Check for Update." button.

iPhone 4

Once that was finished, I opened up the iTunes app on my iPhone 4 to see if I could find my Shared media. iTunes did not show any shared media. I next opened up the iPod app on my iPhone and again could not find any links to shared media. This was bewildering (see my proposed solution at end of article). I checked online and couldn't seem to locate any information on how to make this happen. Finally I decided to check in the Settings app. Inside Settings-iPod I found an area labeled, "Home Sharing." I entered my iTunes email address and password here:

Once that was done, a new item appeared in the iPod listing. Shared:

Clicking on this listing gave me a choice of "shared" iTunes libraries to choose from:

I chose the library associated with my Mac Mini media center as it contains every piece of media that I own. Once that was done, I was able to see all of my music and movies that were being shared from iTunes running on the Mac Mini:

iPad

The steps to make this happen on the iPad were roughly the same, but for some reason Apple has decided to put shared movies into the "Videos" application instead of the iPod app. I'm not quite sure what Apple's reasoning is for even having a Videos application? What is gained by introducing a lack of consistency and different user interface on these two EXTREMELY similar iOS devices?

The fact that a link to Shared content does not automatically appear in the iPod app, is a cause of concern for me. Wouldn't the more intuitive and usable solution have been to show a Shared content link within the app, rather than having a user navigate to Settings-iPod and enter Home Sharing information prior to this link appearing?

In my scenario, clicking on the always-showing "Shared" link could bring up a dialogue box asking the user for their Home Sharing information at which point the shared libraries would appear. If Apple had done it this way, it would have created a much simpler and usable procedure imho.

This actually created a pretty fair amount of discomfort for myself and Vic Orly, who is a very competent Apple technician. If it took two geeks like us 15 minutes to figure out how to set up Home Sharing, as well as locate the Shared videos on the iPad (as a result of inconsistencies between the iPhone and iPad interfaces), what will it take for someone with less technical skills to make this happen?

Aside from these small usability glitches, I'm very grateful that Apple has included this functionality in iOS 4.3 and it seems to work very well. Thank you Apple!

CH

Update: There seems to be a glitch in the shared movies when trying to navigate them from my 1st generation iPad. The first dozen or show movie titles continue to repeat as I scroll down all of the movie thumbnails. I can tell that the movies are different, but their correct titles do not display. iPhone 4 displays all shared movies correctly.