During the announcement of MobileMe, one of the most exciting new features was the ability to share large files using your iDisk. The demonstration was pretty cool. Just upload something to your iDisk, and then click on a share file button within the iDisk web application. You could set how long you wanted to share the file or how many downloads before it automatically unshared itself. But, for some reason, Apple decided to pull this feature before they went live with MobileMe at http://www.me.com/.

I’m excited to say that they have finally released it. And it is a very cool new feature to use when your file is too large to send via e-mail. Just go to the iDisk web application on MobileMe and select the file you need to share. It doesn’t have to be in your Public folder anymore. Once you’ve done this you’ll see a Share File… button in the detail (right-most) column that you need to click on.

Share files that are too big to e-mail by clicking the Share File... button

From there you can fill out a form to send a link to someone telling them where to go to get the file if you want to and you can also set how long the link will be available for in days, weeks, or months – I’m a little disappointed that you can’t set the number of downloads allowed. You can also set a password that the person will need to enter to download the file if you wish.

The sheet that slides out after clicking the Share File... button

If you need to change anything after you’ve shared the file, you can click on the Sharing Options… button that is displayed in the detail column to get back to the same sheet you initially filled out the sharing details on. If you don’t remember which folder the file is in, there is a Shared Files item you can click on on the left side of the window to reveal all of the files you are currently sharing.

A view of all of your shared files

Apple also has a brief video tutorial that shows how to use this new feature.