Macenstein

“OMFG INSTALL AIR SHARING!”. Such are the words of faithful Macenstein reader Michael who couldn’t be more right.

Air Sharing is an extremely slick and well thought-out application that enables the fabled “Disk Mode” on your iPhone, allowing you to copy files to and from the iPhone wirelessly. The best part is it’s free (for the next 2 weeks) and it works LIKE BUTTER.

Not only can it act as a portable drive, but its built-in viewer allows you to actually look at most “normal” file types, such as jog, pdf, Word, Text, and many more. Even music and movie files.

I’m not going to go too into how to set it up, as it’s extremely simple and Air Sharing itself does a brilliant job of walking you through the connection process for not only the Mac, but for Windows and Linux computers as well. On the Mac it’s simply a matter of launching Air Sharing on the iPhone and then on your Mac choosing “GO > Connect to Server” (Command+K) in the Finder and entering the address Air Sharing gives you. Your iPhone then shows up in the Finder’s sidebar as a shared disk and on your desktop (if your Finder Prefs are set up that way) and you can drag files to and from as you please, just as any other network disk. You can even make an alias to it for quicker mounting in the future.

Unfortunately, this does not give you direct access to your music and photo folders, but still, this is a very nicely done app. The only problem I experienced thus far is a crash while viewing a 20 MB PDF I moved over, but I don’t fault the app. (It actually DID display it, after a wait, it just crashed out afterwards).

Above: Security buffs can optionally require a password, although somehow I doubt this will be much of a concern as the connection goes down when you quit the app.

Above: You can drag in any file type you want, although Air Sharing cannot preview them all on the iPhone. But Word Docs, PDFs, and many graphics files work great!

Above: Hey, remember when we were the only site to break the Nike Air news? That was awesome.

The best thing about Air Share is it’s free for the next 2 weeks (well, the best thing is that it works so well, but the free thing ain’t bad either). After that the price will go up to $6.99, so even you don’t own an iPhone or iPod touch, but you think one day you may, go download it now, just in case. I can’t wait to see how the iPhone handles Final Cut!