The software that lets you drag and drop just about anything onto your iPhone. What's going on on, rich Demiro, this is rich On Tech in the show today, we're going to talk about some really cool software that kind of makes your iPhone much easier to use because you can literally drag and drop any file from your computer onto your phone. Do some cool stuff there with ringtones as well. Let me bring on Josh Brown. He works with soft a Reno. This is a cool company that
makes this software. Josh, thanks so much for joining me.
Hi, Rich, Hi, everybody, thank you for having me.
Marketing director of soft a Reno. You're the guy that when you download some software from you guys, your face pops up in a little video.
Exactly exactly and may be annoying to somebody because you know, you're not used to seeing a face when you're loading up an app. But this was our little, little revolutionary way of trying to communicate with the audience that uses our apps. We try to have an onboarding video to walk you through teach you how to use the product, even though it's very simple, but be trying to have our own little stamp there.
Yeah, and it's pretty smart because most of the time when I download software, there's like, you know, maybe some overlays on the screen.
What does everyone do?
They immediately click through all those overlays, don't read any of them, and then all of a sudden you're like, wait, now how do I use this? So by you giving that one minute two minute intro, you kind of explain, Hey, here's what you can do with this software, here's how you use it. So let's talk about the first piece of software that I've been using for a while. It's called Walter two. And they had, you know, they had the original one W A L.
T R.
And what this does is it's kind of like the missing link between your computer and your iPhone. Imagine how tough it is to sync your iPhone with iTunes. If I told you, hey, can you put this book on your iPhone? You wouldn't know how to do that, right if you actually had that file on your computer. Well, with this software, you literally just drag and drop almost any file onto the software and it will magically appear on your phone, and not just on your phone, but
in the proper place. So josh Am I explaining that properly.
That's fully correct. What we tried to create was a simple drop zone that will allow you to just drag and drop any file in any format without you having to think what format is supposed to be in where it's supposed to be, you know, placed. We just want you to drag and drop a file and it's going to appear on your device as if, you know, as
if it was an Android device. Because a lot of people are used to Android phones where they have folders where you can just drag and drop files into a folder and it will appear on the device, we kind of kind of wanted to have that here, but we try to add a little Apple touch to it, where we create a simple, beautiful interface that will allow even you know, anybody like even a granty can you use it.
That's a little slogan. You know, even your mom, your your your brother, your dad, anybody who has no technology, they can open up Walter and Dragons Draft Dragon drop stuff on their iPhone. It will appear there.
And this works with music, so you can, you know, if you have some MP three's, you can just throw them in there. It works with ring tones, It works with videos and not just videos. You know the thing about the iPhone is that it likes things in very specific formats, but you can literally drag and drop a video in like any format. It will figure that out. You can do PDFs, epub files, which are the books I was talking about. And this all again works without iTunes.
In fact, you know that's part of the process is that you want iTunes closed.
I believe right? Is that do you guys say to close its?
Yes, we don't want you to open up iTunes so it doesn't interfere with Walter. We do allow you to transfer stuff over Wi Fi as well, so you can just you don't have to. It's a cordless experience. You only have to launch iTunes wants to enable Wi Fi for your device, but after that you don't have to keep it open and you can drag and drop files into your phone over Wi Fi and the beauty of wald One second, you mentioned video files, which which is
really important. A lot of people they have to convert various formats to make them compatible with iPhone and that's what keeps it confusing. That's why a lot of people want to avoid it and avoid like Dragon, transferring any file, any video file into their iPhone. Walter. It takes the file you have it figures out which format it's supposed to convert to, converts it under the hood. You don't even know what's going on.
Under the hood.
We take care of everything for it, and we transfer it into your device into the proper place, into the native TV app that Apple created, which is also a good advantage because a lot of people may use external video players music players on their phone, but Apple actually optimized for battery efficiency their own apps, so it's better to use native video and music players because they save battery life, and we try to do that with our program.
And by the way, all the stuff that you just talked about happens really fast, so when you drag and drop, it's not like you see this big, huge progress bar of converting some file. It all happens sort of in the background. You just see it as Okay, I'm dragging this into this drop zone, and next thing you know, it's on my phone. And I've done this with my kids because it's a lot easier than trying to sink
a whole bunch of stuff with iTunes. Like my kid wants some old videos, you know, home movies that we had of him as a kid, and I just literally dragged and dropped those on there.
I didn't care what format.
I was just going through today and looking at some of these things, and I have been like some of these crazy formats you were talking about, like three GP, like remember that one that's like a that was like a tiny like one. Yeah, it was like a one megabyte file or something like that. Yeah, just throw it on there, it will figure it out. Mk V a v I m P four m O V MPEG, M two t S. I don't even know what that one is.
W m V a DVD format, M M two t S is a DVD form. So if you have a DVD that you want to rip and you want to transferred to your device or to your iPad, for example, maybe like your your wedding on a DVD. That's what a lot of people have. You know, you can put it on your iPad and you can show it to your family.
Once again, why is Walter Too not in the MacApp Store and why I'm just imagining that Apple does not like.
What you're doing.
Let me let me be honest with you. They do like our software, and uh they do use our absolutely see like users from Apple, and we've seen we've had customers that were recommended to use our product by some Apple representatives.
Uh.
Maybe at an Apple store when the customer comes in they tell you that, you know, the iTunes sucks, let me put on some stuff on iPhone. They try to recommend different solutions.
Uh.
But the reason that it's not on the App Store is because they have guidelines. They have rules, and we are our product is too smart in terms of uh, you know, side stepping iTunes. We we I'm not going to get into all the tech you details, but we
did reverse how iTunes work. We figured out how Apple uses iTunes to put stuff to sink your device, and we took all the all the good stuff, took all the transferring stuff, We improved it, and we created our own product with a lot of different things on top of converter conversion, with book support, with Wi Fi and all that stuff. So it's not on there because it doesn't comply with the rules that that iTunes the Apple Store needs for your app to have.
But at the end of the day, when someone sees something like this, it is it is kind of funny because Apple has built this kind of walled garden. Obviously they'd like you to download everything from them and get all the ring tones and all that stuff from them. But the reality is the way that computers have been in the past was never like that. Like everyone, you know, if you you know, if you had an MP three player back in the day before the iPod, it was
like super simple. You just drag and drop, you know, from a Windows interface onto that device or a flash drive. Think about how that works. But the iPhone is really this giant hard drive that's almost like inaccessible to the average user in a simple.
Way, exactly exactly, especially for people that are moving from Android to iPhone. I think Apple has like a whole landing page where they try to walk you through and they tell you that it's so easy to move from an Android device to an iPhone, And that's what I heard. I heard a lot of arguments from people that won't move to an iPhone just because they can't have the freedom of moving files to their phone. And our product
is actually that you know, that painkiller, that solution. It allows you to just drag and drop stuff as you're used to on an Andrew device. And let me just add one more thing you're probably wondering, like what Walter is w altr Walter the name It was released in twenty fourteen, and the name was inspired by Walter White from Breaking Bad back in the day. It was a huge, huge TV show that's popular, and that's that's why we we named it Walter ah nice.
Now we know the name. That's a little bit of trivia. If you guys ever make it a jeopardy as an answer. Now, if you're listening to this podcast, you will know the question for that one. So Walter forty bucks. You can download it from the website softter Reno. So that's that's a great app and it's just kind of a great tool to have in your toolkit if you're a Mac user, even Windows users.
It works with Windows as well.
It's just one of those apps that's kind of like it comes in handy and it's really nice and it's so simple that you will not believe once you try it, you will just not believe.
Do you give like a free trial or anything with.
That, Yes, we do. It's a completely free download. You download it for free and you can use it for an entire day without having to pay. Like there's no restrictions. There's no limitations except for having a day to use it. So you can if you're really in need of transferring files, you can use the free version. You don't have to buy it.
Yeah, there you are, and you'll be the hero at work.
If you work somewhere and they're like, oh my gosh, we got to get all these things on an iPhone for a presentation tomorrow or whatever. The executive and you're like, oh, I heard this on the podcast. I know exactly how we can do that very easily, especially if they're in some weird, like weird file formats that these people have created. If you need a convenient tool for your iPhone, it's kind of like the tool that is not included with your iPhone if you gave me a choice between iTunes.
I mean, I think most people like to disable the auto open of iTunes when they plug their iPhone into their computer. If you're at all tech savvy, that's pretty much the first thing.
You turn off, right, Yes, yes, exactly, all right.
Josh Brown of soft Reno, thanks so much for joining me on the podcast today. How can folks get in touch with the software that we talked about here?
Oh, you can find us at softerreno dot com. That's s O F T O R I N O dot com. It's free to download, free to try, and if you like it you can buy it.
All right, thank you for having me all right, thanks for being on the show. Josh Brown a soft reno. Appreciate it. And if you want links to all the apps I just talked about, go to my website. It is rich on tech dot tv, or you can check the show notes. Thanks so much for listening.
I'm Rich Damiro. I'll talk to you real soon.