Hedge Connect App – Remote Monitoring for Hedge for Mac

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by Olaf von VossDecember 5^th, 2016

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Just as promised at this years IBC, Hedge Connect – a notification app for the data transfer tool Hedge for Mac – has now hit the App Store. This is another result of all the energy that has gone into the development of Hedge since its initial release back in March. 

You can install Hedge Connect on iOS devices such as iPhone or iPad. There’s no native Apple Watch app yet, but you can still receive notifications from the iOS app.

Meet Hedge Connect

We’ve already reviewed Hedge for Mac before (read Nino’s original review here as well as my update here) and I must say again that I’m quite impressed with its performance. Its speed in comparing the checksums is almost as fast as a native copy/paste operation with the Finder. The reason behind the speedy checksum verifications is Hedge’s use of the xxHash algorithm rather than the more common MD5. In fact, Hedge claims to be able to outperform MD5 by at least 15%, depending on the speed of your Mac.

With the freshly-released Hedge Connect app, you can now remotely monitor the progress of your Hedge for Mac transfers, both with the premium and free versions. All you need to do is download the app and link it to your copy of Hedge for Mac using a special passcode displayed in the app preferences.

Once the main application is linked to the iOS app, it will notify you whenever a transfer is finished. No more running back and forth between set and the off-site DIT station in small crew shoots, as you will know exactly when the transfer queue is done. If something unexpected happens that requires your attention, the app will notify you of that too, of course.

While testing the app for myself, I am happy to say that everything just worked the way it’s supposed to, with no glitches whatsoever and fortunately, not even error messages. You will need to upgrade the Hedge for Mac app to version 1.5 in order to benefit from the new features of the app.

Further Development

Paul Matthijs Lombert, CEO of Hedge for Mac, has written up a blog post about the new developed iOS app and he has this to say:

We feel that Hedge Connect is a starting point, just like Hedge for Mac was when we first released it. We’ve done a lot of major updates since then, and we expect to do the same with Hedge Connect.”

As things stand now, the $9.99 Hedge Connect app doesn’t do much except informing you when a transfer is done. This may not sound like its brimming with functionality, but I think it can save you some precious minutes during those busy shooting days. I speak from experience when I say that anything that can help you maintain a certain peace of mind on a shoot can be incredibly helpful.

Future versions of Hedge Connect should offer things like realtime progress bars or even remote control capabilities, and that’s exactly what’s in store according to Paul’s timeline for the app. I’m really curious about the direction this development will take! The way I see it, though, it is for now a simple, yet very helpful app with a lot of potential. Think about the solid framework of further development yet to come.

Right now this app is available for iOS only, but you can write an email to Paul ([email protected]) regarding an Android version. And make sure to check out Hedge’s blog for more information.

Hedge for Mac is offering a 10% discount for all cinema5D readers, so if you are interested, click here.

What kind of offloading tool do you use at the moment? Would you think this kind of remote capabilities might be helpful for your workflow? Let us know in the comments below!