#FF00AA

I’ve already seen announcements about several applications that let you freely copy and store files on your iPhone, but this one is free for the first two weeks (starting yesterday) so I’m in a position to test it (I don’t need such an app enough for me to buy one) and strongly recommend that you hurry and install it as well.

Like I said, I don’t know how good the competitors are, but I can tell you that this one is very well done: whenever Air Sharing is open on your iPhone, it acts like a WebDAV server (I’m surprised they couldn’t use the underlying OS X network layer to provide standard Apple or Windows filesharing, but on second thought they might likely be hidden from the official SDK), which appears to be natively accessible from any Mac or PC; the iPhone doesn’t spontaneously appear in your computer’s network list, but all you have to do is type the http address in Finder / Explorer and create a shortcut to the network drive. The beauty of it being that you don’t need any special software on the computer, and you can access your files from any wifi-connected computer, anywhere.

That means you can use Air Sharing to transfer files, or to carry some important files everywhere with you in a way that’s even more elegant than a USB key (although it will deplete your iPhone’s battery pretty quickly if you don’t plug it in); but you can also view the files on your iPhone, and a wide variety of formats are supported — from Safari web archives to syntax-highlighted source code. Right now I’ve used it to store subway maps (you can’t use iPhoto for that, as it will automatically resize them down to just slightly bigger than the device’s screen), but I’m pretty sure I’ll find other uses for it (although I haven’t got much free space on my old 8GB).

All the settings you need are there, too: you can choose whether to set a password (since the server is only active when the application is open — i.e., not in the background — and you need to know the phone’s IP address to access it, you probably don’t need to set one if you don’t have super-secret files), turn off sharing at any time (so you can view files in the app while the server is disabled, which is more secure and probably saves battery life), and prevent the phone from going to sleep (and automatically closing the application) when Air Sharing is open — you can even choose whether you want to disable sleep completely (so you can access your network drive all-day while the iPhone is charging on its dock) or just set a longer inactivity timer (so you have time to rummage through folders from your computer even if your iPhone’s system setting is to turn off very quickly when you don’t touch it).

This is a very nice piece of software; a must-download for free for two weeks, and clearly worth the $7 it will cost afterwards if you do have a use of it. (Reminder: “free for two weeks” on the App Store means you can download it, and keep it and use it, for free, forever, and even get updates for free as long as they don’t change the application ID — i.e., probably until version 2.0.)