Sync

iOS sync and space management at a glance - without iTunes.

The current solution in iTunes

iTunes does it all: It manages all your music, podcasts, TV shows and movies, it offers a store to download even more of it and allows you to sync it all to iOS devices. While this multifunctionality was great for the iPod era it got too cluttered with the diversity of available media nowadays.

iTunes 12 and the seperation of iBooks into a standalone app was already a step in the right direction. Ideally iTunes should be split up into seperate apps for different types of media (music, movies, podcasts) to achieve a unified experience across iOS and OS X devices. Additionally a sync app serves as a central hub to manage what content should be synced to an iOS device.

The approach of Sync

Sync is how you wirelessly connect iOS devices to your Mac. When a new iOS device is added to your iCloud, a matching icon permanently appears in your dock to open the respective Sync app.

Sync allows you to manage your iOS devices no matter where they are since they are wirelessly linked to your Mac at all times through iCloud or Wi-Fi. Not only does it show you a whole lot of statistics like data usage and average battery life but you can also easily spot what takes up all the space of your iOS device. There is a tab for each type of media (music, photos, apps, movies, podcasts) to easily select what to sync.

Hovering over the pie chart highlights the respective content type and its occupied space.

Sort your music by albums, songs or artists and simply select what to sync.

The wireless sync will start automatically as soon as new music is selected.

One more thing

Dragging files onto the dock icon will automatically send them to your iOS device which is faster than opening AirDrop, Dropbox or emailing files to yourself.