Adam Engst:
But it’s important to distinguish the marketing discussion of new features from release notes about precisely what has changed, and one change might have escaped your notice: the elimination of the Web Sharing options in the Sharing pane of System Preferences.
Adam gives a couple of suggestions on how to bring the feature back for those that need it.
That’s a shame. WebSharing has been tremendously useful for local ad-hoc sharing of files, like when teaching a class or presenting something at a CocoaHeads. Much easier than passing around a thumb drive.
OS X is still Unix. Even if Apache is ultimately removed completely, it should be easy to install it.
But all that’s happened so far is Apple’s taken the UI away. You can still enable it.
File sharing is still completely available. Web Sharing is for setting up a web page/site on a Mac.
Pay another $20, download OS X Server from the Mac App Store. So now for $40 ($20 for 10.8, $20 for server) you have it all.
To be honest, I’m OK with the new split.
Sure. You can also get a C compiler and write code from scratch too. Deciding at the moment “hey, I want to hand out these slides / samples / cool thing I just found” and then having to go figure out Apache configurations, when I had a nice little UI, kind of sucks.
hi ho, hi ho, off to Radar I go.
Can’t you just use AirDrop or activate local File Sharing for the use case you described…?
Assuming everyone has very new Macs (Airdrop doesn’t support older machines), and you don’t have anyone using windows or linux.
File sharing has a connection limit on non-Server systems. Plus it’s easier to say “point your web browser at bork.local” vs “connect to file server bork.local and navigate to…” And in that case you only have files – it takes very little time to whip up a quick html file to guide people.
Sure, there are alternatives that kind of half-work or take more up-front effort. Was “Mom and Dad trying to run a professional website” that much of a problem that needed solving?