ANTenna Blog -- Apple

I've written before about how difficult it is to share documents between an iPhone (or iPod touch) and a standard PC. The solution that I've suggested is to use Google Docs. But there's a better way, especially if you want to work on an airplane or at other times when your iPhone isn't connected to the Internet.

The new solution is an application called Air Sharing. It lets you mount your iPhone (or iPod touch) as a wireless drive on a Mac, Windows or Linux PC. I've only tried it with a Mac, and it works great.

Once you've mounted the device as a drive, it looks like a USB key, as far as your desktop or notebook PC is concerned. You can then drag-and-drop documents to/from that "drive." Then, from the iPhone, you can view those documents. You can't edit them, mind you — but you can view them. You can also drag them back from the iPhone, so in effect you can now use the iPhone as a remote storage device for data.

You can view the following types of documents on the iPhone, according to Avatron Software, which created Air Sharing (I haven't tried them all):

• iWork (Pages, Numbers, and Keynote), full resolution if saved with preview
• Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, and PowerPoint), with limited support for XML formats
• Web Archive (web-page downloads packaged by Safari)
• Web page
• PDF
• HTML
• RTF (Rich Text Format)
• RTFD (TextEdit documents with embedded images)
• Plain text (many different file extensions), with Unicode support
• Source code (C/C++, Objective C/C++, C#, Java, Javascript, XML, shell scripts, Perl, Ruby, Python, and more), with color-coded formatting
• Movie (standard iPhone formats: H.264, MPEG-4, 3GPP, etc.)
• Audio (standard iPhone formats: MP3 VBR, AAC, Audible, Apple Lossless, AIFF, WAV, CAF, etc.)
• Image (standard iPhone formats: GIF, PNG, JPG, TIFF, etc.)

The software costs $6.99 from the iTunes App Store, and it's well worth the price.