Pastefire: The Quickest Way To Get Stuff From The Web To Your iPhone

Do you find yourself constantly emailing stuff to your iPhone just so you can have it when you leave your desk? I do: emails, links, addresses, phone numbers, photos. Well, now there is an app for that. It’s called Pastefire, and it comes naturally enough from the app-sharing service Appsfire (which was co-founded by former TechCrunch writer Ouriel Ohayon). You can get the free app on iTunes here http://getap.ps/pastefire (if you click that link on your iPhone it will open up the App Store for you, and is another service AppsFire will launch soon which will combine short links for iPhone apps with analytics on conversions).

Pastefire lets you send links, phone numbers, email addresses, videos, and photos to your iPhone, and then it figures out what to do with them automatically. For example, after you sign up, you just add a bookmarket to your browser or go to the Pastfire “Copy Zone” and paste a link. Then if you fire up the app on your iPhone, it will open up that link in Safari. A phone number initiates a call. An email address opens up the Mail app addressed to that person. A photo URL lets you save the image to your phone’s image gallery. A video link opens up the YouTube app and plays the video. You can also post to Twitter, search in Google or Wikipedia, or save to a local clipboard.

If you turn on the automated mode, the app performs these actions automatically depending on what you send to your iPhone from your desktop. Or you can do it yourself in manual mode. More options are on the way, such as opening up a map for an address. And there are a few bugs which will be fixed soon as well. For instance, when you copy a photo to your gallery, it doesn’t open up the gallery. My other main complaint about the app is that you can only send one thing at a time. So if you want to send a bunch of links, emails, and photos all at once, you have to open up the app for each one and perform an action before you can move on to the next one. It should just store everything in the clipboard if things pile up. The other drawback is that you actually have to open the app. Here notifications would work really well, letting you send things directly to the top of your iPhone screen without having to hunt for the Pastefire app icon.

But these are minor quibbles. All-in-all, Pastefire is a solid productivity app and I’m going to be using it a lot.