Why Pushing Files is a Great Idea
I write about and review technology for a living. When I refer to "the box of smartphones in my office," I literally mean a box filled with smartphones. When a new phone arrives for review and I can't find space for it in the box, I send some of the older loaners back to their manufacturers.
So when I say that I think the iPhone is the best phone out there, that opinion is backed by a certain amount of experience.
And when I say that there's one feature found on even the cheapest smartphone that I sorely, sometimes desperately miss ... well, that's kind of a big deal, too.
It's such a bloody simple feature: a memory card slot. Or failing that, a simple USB connection that mounts the phone's storage on my desktop like any other USB device.
Those things are an open invitation to put a piece of data on the phone and use it. On a Windows Mobile or RIM BlackBerry or Google Android smartphone, there's nothing stopping you from putting a file on the device. Drag a file from your desktop on to the phone's icon on your desktop and presto: a copy of a vital report, or just a movie to watch on your flight to Denver, is on your device.
On the iPhone, iTunes alone has the authority to install a file that can be seen by the whole system. Which is annoying enough even if it's a video or a music file. It's doubly annoying when you're prevented from copying a Word file, or a spreadsheet, presentation, a PDF — files that the iPhone can open and read, no problem. But iTunes has never heard of the things, so there's no built-in way to exploit that feature.
So you need to take things into your own hands. Via tricks, Web services, and third-party software, you can work around this problem and make the iPhone into something much, much more than it was. And with some slick hardware in your office, you can add gigabytes or even terabytes of storage to your iPhone.
In general, these are tricks for installing arbitrary desktop files on your iPhone. In practice, this basic technique lets you do all kinds of cool and useful things:
On and on and on.
But the most significant advantage to copying files to my iPhone is the simple fact that I know they're on my iPhone. There are lots of cool services for accessing data via the Web or even over the Internet via a neat iPhone app. I'm even going to recommend some of them here.
The trouble is, even the 3G network doesn't stretch everywhere. It's not reachable on a plane and in many parts of New England. And what if you're deep inside a building?
When I'm at the front desk of my hotel and the clerk claims to have no record of my reservation ... well, my confirmation number is no damned use to me on a server somewhere in Oregon, is it? I need it to be there on my iPhone. Should I just trust that I'm going to have 3G reception in every place I need it?
Et cetera.
Okay, I sense that you're sold. Let's ease you into this slowly. There are multiple approaches with multiple advantages.
The easiest solution involves no added software or services. Just e-mail a copy of the file to yourself as a file attachment, and then let the iPhone fetch the message. They land in your inbox as an e-mail (see Figure 20-1) and when you give the attachment a tap, the file opens using the iPhone's builtin media reader.
Pro: Dead-simple. And if you manually download the file, the docs stay in memory long after you've lost Internet access or put the phone into Airplane mode.
Con: You can't count on the data sticking around. As soon as the iPhone needs some more storage space, it'll purge the actual data from memory, forcing you to download it all over again. And remember, your inbox can hold only up to 200 messages at once. If you're thinking about keeping a copy of your campus map, think again; if you have anything akin to a social life, e-mails from friends will wipe it from the rolls in days.
Hmm. Not bad. you should definitely keep that in mind, but you sort of want permanence, don't you? is sort of slaps at the problem.
Okay, before I go on: I skimmed over this whole "just give the file a tap and it'll open right up" business. The iPhone has a built-in viewer that supports a long list of file types. All the "tap and it'll open" techniques in this chapter — or elsewhere in the book — will work with any of these kinds of files:
Apple keeps expanding this list, so stay tuned to www.apple.com/iphone/specs.html for the current roster.
Let's go back to the basic function I whined about at the top of this chapter. There's a file on my PC or Mac and I want to use it on my iPhone. I want to just drag it from Point a to Point B. Simple.
Ideally, I'd be copying a file directly from my desktop to the iPhone. Okay, but what if I could copy it to a folder on my desktop, and then Unseen Forces automatically transmitted it to a virtual folder on a server on the Internet? And then my iPhone could access this same virtual folder via Wi-Fi or 3G?
That's good enough, and that's a basic concept known as "cloud storage."
You sign up for an account with a special service that gives you a parcel of storage on one of their servers — typically a flash drive's worth, more or less.
Instead of sticking this "flash drive" in a USB port, you double-click a little desktop app that connects to that server, logs into your account, and then "mounts" that folder on your desktop, where it behaves just like any hard drive. It works like any other folder. Drag files in, edit files inside it, save and open documents inside it from within any app. Plain vanilla, through and through. Neither you nor your computer are particularly aware that your files live thousands of miles away.
Cloud storage has two basic advantages. You can connect to this virtual folder from any computer or even any device. If it can connect to the Internet, it can connect to the cloud storage service and access your files. The second advantage is that you don't even necessarily need to formally "mount" your virtual folder at all. You can access all your files via any Web browser.
Cloud storage is practically tailor-made for smartphones. There's even a side benefit: I can't "add" more storage to my iPhone, but accessing a cloud service through my iPhone is like attaching a 1-gigabyte flash drive or even a 100-gigabyte hard drive to my iPhone. It's the perfect storage for "deep archive" files that I'd like to have access to but that aren't so important that it's worth loading directly inside my iPhone's limited storage space.
There are many cloud services and many of them have released apps for the iPhone that connect to the service and let you access your files. Only three are worth serious attention, methinks: Box.net (http:// box.net) and iDisk, which is offered as part of Apple's MobileMe service package (www.me.com).
(And a third, which is so fantastic that you should probably use it instead of the other two. But I'm tipping my hand for the next section, aren't I?)
No, of course they're useful services. They offer distinct little twists that The ird Mysterious Service lacks.
If you're often working on projects with lots of different folks, Box.net is a good answer. Figure 20-2 shows you the basic iPhone interface. It makes it very easy to have a big folder of personal, private storage, and yet "share" individual files and folders with specific people. When you're accessing your storage via Box.net's desktop Web interface, you can even edit any Microsoft Office files you've stored on the service.
Box.net has a number of monthly pricing plans based on the features and amount of storage you want. They'll give you a 1-gigabyte folder, and all of Box.net's core features for free. For $15 a month, you get 10 gigs and the full buffet of what Box.net can do, including the ability to edit files online.
iDisk (shown in Figure 20-3) is ... well, it's iDisk. Support for iDisk is built into every copy of Mac OS X, and Windows users can access an iDisk with a simple, free download. It's part of the Mac experience. "When you're done with your section of the report, drop it in my iDisk," you say, and if that person is a Mac user, he or she will find that particular function hard-wired right inside the Finder's Go menu. All of Apple's iLife apps use iDisk to share music, photos, and videos. iDisk is just one of the features you get with a $99 annual subscription to Apple's MobileMe service.
That $99 buys you 20 gigs of storage — already much more than the 15 gigs Box. net gives you (for $15 times 12 months, or $180). And if you need more storage, Apple will expand your iDisk for an additional fee.
I like both cloud storage services buuuuut ... no, unless their unique advantages appeal to you, they can't hold a candle to Dropbox.
Okay. So at this point, you know what Dropbox's basic features are. There's a folder on your desktop that behaves like any other folder, only it isn't a real folder, it's actually a connection to your cloud storage on a remote server, you can access your files from any Web browser as well, and there's an iPhone app that allows you to access this folder and view the files.
Dropbox (http://getdropbox.com) wins the iPhone Cloud Storage Crown thanks to two critical features:
Dropbox is a clear win for nearly all iPhone users. The desktop apps work automatically and invisibly. You want that file on your iPhone? Just copy it into your desktop's Dropbox folder and it's done. You don't need to tether anything and you don't even need to have access to the iPhone at the time. When you pick up your iPhone and launch the Dropbox app, the file will be available. And you can keep it permanently.
You can't complain about the pricing, either. You can get 2 gigs of storage for free, and you can get huge storage for fairly low money: 50 gigs for $10 a month, or 100 gigs for $20. And there's no size limit on individual files, so you can even use it to access DVD-length video files from your iPhone. Remember, the iPhone has a built-in player for video files that works in both portrait and full screen landscape modes (see Figure 20-6).
Dropbox is the greatest solution for putting your own arbitrary files on your iPhone. Except, of course, for the other greatest solution for putting your own arbitrary files on your iPhone.
Am I being an unpleasable noodge? I love Dropbox and I use the iPhone app alllll the time. But I still want to be able to simply copy a file from my desktop directly to my iPhone, without having to use the Internet as an intermediary.
Air Sharing Pro from Avatron Software (http://avatron.com) is one of my five favorite apps for the iPhone. I couldn't get by without it. Honestly. You need to buy this app. There's a free edition as well, but I firmly believe that when an opportunity to give these people $9.99 presents itself, everyone should go ahead and do it.
Air Sharing lets you "mount" your iPhone on your desktop as a real, honest-to-God network storage device. It does this by establishing itself on your local Wi-Fi network as a WebDAV file server. What is WebDAV? All you need to know is that Windows, Mac OS, and Linux all support this standard out of the box. Unlike Drop-box, which requires a free "helper" application, your existing computer can simply connect to the iPhone and treat it just like a flash drive, with no extra software needed.
Figure 20-7 shows Air Sharing in action. In addition to the behind-the-scenes magic, Air Sharing Pro is one hell of a slick file manager. It's bloody elegant at organizing and browsing files, and includes a couple of very slick little tricks. I can print files to networked printers, and e-mail files directly from my Air Sharing storage area.
Bonus: I have full control over security. I can set it up so that it requires a username and a password, or leave it completely open. I can turn off the sharing features entirely, and just use the app to browse and read the files I've already copied to my iPhone. Or I can even just establish a single folder as a public folder. If I'm physically inside the office, anybody can just throw a file into my iPhone, which I suppose could be the modern digital equivalent of slapping a "Kick Me" sign on my back without my knowing it. But I bet there are legitimate business uses, too.
The Air Sharing app is completely inert when it's not running. None of your PCs or Macs will be able to see or access the Air Sharing documents on your iPhone until you launch the app and "mount" the phone on your desktop as a shared folder.
Tip
And just now (doing the last-minute final edits on this whole book), I've received an e-mail from Air Sharing's developers, with a list of new features coming in the next edition: the ability to access any Internet server via FTP, download any Internet file via its URL, and even access your Mac remotely, browse your hard drive via Air Sharing, and download individual files to your iPhone from thousands of miles away.
The developers tell me it ought to be ready for you by the time you read this. Yet more reasons for you to earmark $9.99 for Air Sharing Pro.
Note the URL at the bottom of Figure 20-7. That's the network address that your computer uses to find your iPhone on the local Wi-Fi network.
Typical of the amount of care and thought that went into Air Sharing is the fact that a set of detailed step-by-step directions for mounting the iPhone as a shared folder are hard-wired right in the app. Just tap the question mark (?) at the bottom of the screen and you'll see instructions for Windows (with separate detailed instructions for each edition), Mac, and Linux (see Figure 20-8).
At the end of these two or three steps, a new shared network folder appears on your desktop. It's your iPhone, and there's no difference between this shared folder and any other folder you've ever worked with. Figure 20-9 shows you what my iPhone looks like to Windows XP; Figure 20-10 is what it looks like to a Mac.
Some random notes on the setup:
Like I said, copying and manipulating files on the iPhone is the boring half of this app's functionality. It's when you're gadding about the metropolis that Air Sharing shines. Just navigate through folders. Want to view a Word document that you copied to your special Hybrid Fish-Ocelot Project folder? Tap on the folder to open it and then tap on the Word document to view it. Want to watch a video? Tap on the video and it starts playing. Ditto for audio files.
And don't just use this app as an alternative media player! It's like a flash drive that you never forget to slip inside your pocket. If you keep critical files on your iPhone via Air Sharing, you'll always have your digital workspace with you as you move from machine to machine and city to city.
It's kind of as if you've created a whole second smartphone within the iPhone. Because none of the other iPhone apps can see or interact with the content you've copied into that folder or its subfolders, Air Sharing is the place you go to play with files and media that you're keeping secret from the rest of the phone. It's such a big part of my iPhone life that it's like a whole separate device that I immerse myself in when I need to manipulate and store files "for keeps."
The only limit to Air Sharing is the limitations of your iPhone's storage. You get the luxury of a direct connection without the freedom of being able to copy these files to a much, much bigger storage area. If you copy 5 gigs worth of raw video files to your iPhone, you're five gigs closer to a "Some Files Could Not Be Copied" error from iTunes the next time you try to sync a whole month's worth of video podcasts.
But there's a way to add a real, honest-to or terabyte of hard drive storage to your iPhone.
Regard, please, the simple box shown in Figure 20-11.
You may call it "Pogoplug." At times I'm inclined to refer to it as "the woman whose hand in marriage I am unworthy to covet."
The Pogoplug has an Ethernet port. You use this network port to connect the Pogoplug to your home broadband modem or network. It has a USB port. You connect this to any USB hard drive. Any drive of any capacity. Terabytes. You can even plug in a hub and connect several drives at once.
After a simple, three-step setup, the hard drives connected to your Pogoplug can be network-attached to any device you own that has access to the Internet. You just install a special free helper app that makes the Pogoplug-attached drives look and behave like anything you have plugged into one of your computer's USB ports.
(You can also access the data on those hard drives via any Web browser. But your eyes are saucer-wide with the potential for transmogrifying your iPhone experience, so I'll skip over that.)
What looks like a simple wall transformer (you can plug it into AC via a long power cord if that's more convenient) actually contains a little computer. One of its tasks is to always tell Pogoplug Central where this little Pogoplug can be found, anywhere in the world.
And it really, really works. I traveled from Boston to Beijing and when I connected my MacBook to the hotel Internet two blocks away from Tiananmen Square, the little Pogoplug app automatically contacted www.pogoplug.com, located my Pogoplug in my office half a world away, and my office drive icons appeared on my desk-top. Just like that.
There is indeed a Pogoplug app for the iPhone. It does indeed absolutely kick butt. Behold Figure 20-12.
Launching the app connects me to Ryder, a 500-gigabyte USB hard drive in my Bos-ton office.
As with any of these other file tricks you've seen so far, tapping on any viewable file (picture, movie, audio, document) puts it on the screen. And like the Dropbox app, I can tap a Download button to copy the file directly into the Pogoplug app's iPhone storage (see Figure 20-13), where the file remains safe and sound whether I have Internet access or not.
The damned thing works. It works! Icon -fess that I wasn't completely ready to accept that when I first set up my Pogoplug. But it's absolutely the perfect storage solution. Unlike "cloud" solutions, copying files to my storage takes less than no time. When I wanted to put thousands of songs on that drive, I just unplugged the drive from the Pogoplug and connected it to my desktop for the transfer. When I want to expand my storage capacity, I just swap the drive for a bigger one ... or just attach a second drive via a USB hub.
And, I repeat, this whole "locate your Pogoplug no matter where it is in the world" absolutely works. I think it's the only such solution that actually functions as advertised. Even in Beijing it worked flawlessly.
The Pogoplug is just $99 from www.pogoplug.com. $99! I'm shocked. There are no subscription plans and no monthly fees and no bandwidth restrictions. $99 and you own it. Period.
It's insane. It transforms the iPhone from simply awesome to megahypersuperawe-some with bacon bits. is one simple, affordable device obliterates the problem of having to choose what media and data you want to put on your iPhone. Make a copy of your entire iTunes library and copy it to your Pogoplug. Now, every song and video you own is "on your iPhone." If you use your Pogoplug simply as your home network server, you'll never be caught away from your house without an important file. Just pull out your iPhone and get the file that you were working on this morning.
I'm babbling now. I should probably move on.
So what's the best solution to the problem of carrying arbitrary files with you? Drop-box, Air Sharing Pro, or Pogoplug?
I like all three. They're three different approaches to the same problem. I use Air Sharing to turn my iPhone into a virtual flash drive. It contains all the files that I always want with me.
But it's a minor hassle to mount the Air Share volume on my desktop. So I often use Dropbox for casual "I want to put copy of my travel itinerary and confirmation numbers on my iPhone" sort of things. I just save the file to a local folder and that's all there is to it.
I use the Pogoplug because it's a killer device for anyone who uses computers and travels. The fact that I can access every file I own and every one of the Bugle's 100-plus podcasts without taking up space on my iPhone is a tremendous bonus.
All three are killers. And all three underscore the wisdom of George Carlin's old "A Place for Your Stuff" routine.
He described your house as nothing more than "a place for your stuff." When you go on vacation to Maui for a couple of weeks, you need to pack a smaller version of your stuff. Then a friend of yours suggests that you spend the weekend at the beach house of a friend of his, so you fill a knapsack with an even tinier version of your stuff ... et cetera.
The key to my happiness and security as a nerd is the ability to keep creating smaller and smaller versions of my digital world.
On my desk in the office, I have the big, quad-core big-screen desktop machine with 2 terabytes of attached storage: My Stuff. My MacBook in the living room is a smaller version of my stuff.
So what happens when I'm headed someplace and I just don't want to bring a computer with me?
Of course, "no computer" is translated in my head as " some kind of computer, certainly." The iPhone, equipped with these three apps, allows me to create probably the smallest acceptable version of My Stuff. I have my e-mail, I have the Web ... and I also have a gigabyte or two of files from my desktop to read, amuse, edit, and just surround myself with a slight static-y feeling of security.
Don't ask me why I need to have an eight-year-old manuscript of a novel I stopped thinking about three years ago. There's no sensible answer and the one I make up wouldn't make me look very good. I'm just grateful to have a working solution.