We’ve featured Courier on our website in the past as a Weekly Sponsor, but we wanted to provide a walk-through and review for using this very slick app for uploading videos, pictures and documents to sites across the web.
Courier is now exclusively available from the Mac App Store, and shows itself to be one very well designed and simple to use app.
What is Courier?
Essentially, Courier acts as a one stop shop to upload all of your digital content to the web. It allows for the uploading of videos to YouTube and Vimeo, pictures to Facebook and Flickr, as well as built in support for FTP servers and Amazon’s S3 Storage.
Main Courier Window
Courier embraces the idea of mailing your documents and media across the web using Envelopes and Stamps. You fill envelopes with files that you you need to upload, and apply the stamps to tell Courier where to send it.
In the most basic sense, it acts as a simple desktop uploading tool. You can use Courier to upload videos to your YouTube account or photos to your Flickr account without having to go to their respective websites. However, Courier also makes uploading one file to multiple sites a breeze.
Advanced Uploading
Courier lets you apply multiple stamps to the same envelope. This way, you can get that skateboarding dog video you filmed last weekend to all your favorite video sharing sites. It will even let you set the metadata for videos and photos, so they are ready for sharing the moment they hit the server.
Multiple Destinations
Along with the several built in locations and online services supported, Realmac has created a repository of add on locations including Box.net and CloudApp. At the moment, there isn’t a huge range of options, but a SDK lets Objective-C developers create their own, shareable, destinations. I’m looking forward to seeing this expand over the coming months.
Add-ons for Courier
User Experience
Realmac really paid attention to the user design details. The app resembles a shelf with various envelopes you can scroll though. Adding stamps to folders is a neat process, and it’s fun to have a physical object that connects to the digital process of uploading files.
Adding Stamps
Another gorgeous part of the application is the Activity View (or Map view). This view lets you see the distance your files are actually traveling while uploading.
For instance, when you upload a video to Youtube, the file progress is shown from your location to San Francisco, California. It’s cute and unnecessary, but a refreshing change to the boring progress bars that fill almost all internet based applications on our Macs.
Map View
Extra Features
There are a couple of extra features worth mentioning before we finish. First, Courier lets you ‘skin’ the envelopes that you use each day. There are a few dozen skins you can download from their website.
Second, within the Activity (Map) view, you have a scrollable history of the various videos and files you have recently uploaded. This is handy for reminding yourself of files that have passed through the application in the past.
Wrapping Up
I love the idea behind Courier – a centralized space for uploading files to multiple locations. It would work perfectly to send photos to family via MobileMe, friends via Facebook, and to your site via FTP. The built in delivery tools works super well and the user interface design is something that is both beautiful and useful.
However, a downside is the relatively sparse number of locations that you can upload to at the moment. I hope that Courier’s community helps to grow and expand the number of destinations and skins that you can add to your envelopes in the app.
Courier is now only available through the Mac App Store. When it launched it was $25 (with a $20 introductory price) but is now available only via the App Store at $9.99.
The initial price seemed slightly steep for the features on offer, but for less than the price of a few cups of coffee it will sure save you time and make uploading more fun.