The iPhone to me is less phone, and more of an extension to computing. And for a device to extend your primary workstation’s functions, it needs to be able to transparently move data back and forth, with minimal user interaction. I haven’t synced my iPhone with my Mac in over a month. That’s partly because my iTunes doesn’t recognise my iPhone, but more so because I don’t need to. Everything is wireless, and in many cases, over the cloud.

Sharing your entire Mac with Here, File File!

The latest entrant in remote data access, the weirdly named “Here, File File!” allows you access to your entire Mac, including any connected rives, iDisk—basically whatever your Finder can see. You download a client app, do a little set up, and when you launch your iPhone on the same network, bonjour takes over and you see your Macs. It even grabs the model of the Mac, including the current wallpaper. If you’re looking for remote access, which you are, you will need to know your IP address, and set up your router to forward that port, much like we did for Transmission and others. There’s also a utility PortMap which allows you to effortlessly configure your router forwarding.

In effect, if you take the trouble, have a stable connection, and have a static external IP, it’s a great way of having access to your files remotely. For the rest of us however, it’s a little too much trouble, I don’t have a steady fast ubiquitous connection, and my IP changes more often than the cat asks for food. Read all about it in Brandon’s review.

Sharing Files Using Cloud Storage with DropBox/iDisk

This is the ultimate way to have all your files with you wherever you are. First, iDisk. It comes with MobileMe, and you get a bunch of GBs to play with. You re-map your Documents folder to that on the remote iDisk, have it sync up every few, and thereby have your current data in the cloud as well as on your iPhone. With the iDisk app on the iPhone you can view the files (sadly no editing), as well as email those files without having to download them.

But iDisk is for whusses (they say). Dropbox is the app for the professional. Sign up for a Dropbox account (2GB free) and you then place all your files in the Dropbox folder on your Mac. It’s a regular folder, you can access it locally just as you would any other folder. But Dropbox automatically syncs all your data to the cloud, while maintaining past versions should you ever save over your file uninstentionally. The iPhone experience of Dropbox isn’t far from the iDisk app, but if you’re going to make use of such a ‘cloud based workflow’, you might as well go with something more solid.

Sharing Files over Wifi with AirSharing Pro

If there ever was someone who complained about the iPhone not behaving like a standard USB mass storage device, they’ve not used AirSharing Pro (or any of the other data sharing apps available). In this example, let’s look at how AirSharing works. It can mount as a drive in your Finder or Window Explorer, or can be accessed from the web browser by typing in the special web url. Setup is relatively painless, and once you have it appear on your desktop, transferring files to and fro is just as you’d expect a mass storage device to do so—only a little slower, depending on your wireless connection strength. Moreover, AirSharing Pro allows you to access to FTP locations, iDisk accounts, and a lot more. You can’t edit any of the files you download, but it supports viewing almost any file that’s supported by the iPhone—the viewer itself is terrific for reading PDFs. It’s even got a print function—which I haven’t had the opportunity to use so I can’t comment on. At $9.99, it’s a bit expensive, but considering its featureset, it’s going to save you tons of home screen real estate. If you’re looking for more basic functionality, there AirSharing sans-pro ($2.99), as well as other cheaper (even free) apps on the store.

Sharing Snippets over Wifi with Pastebot

Snippets of text. We come across them every so often in our daily workflow. Most of us without thinking use email as a way of sending bits of text, urls, or images to our iPhones. It’s easy, free, and you don’t have to worry about it too much. But that’s old school, uncool, and you can greatly improve upon the efficiency of that workflow.

Pastebot from the Tapbots factory is what I’m talking about, and I’m sure many of you are already proficient users of this must have app. Pastebot is a clipboard manager for your iPhone. It will grab anything from the clipboard when launched on the iPhone, and you can then manage and store your clips into various folders if you want them to have a longer lifespan. But the beauty of Pastebot—beautiful pixels aside—is that it comes with a brilliant sync client for the Mac. With the sync client active, Pastebot launched on your iPhone, anything you Cmd+C on your Mac gets instantly transferred into the Pastebot clipboard history.  Not just that. You can reverse paste clips from your iPhone onto your Mac just by tapping and holding on any clip. It’s so instantaneous and friction free, you could even use it as a dedicated clipboard manager for your Mac. The entire process is nothing short of magical, and I’d highly recommend it to anyone who wants to use their iPhone in a productive workflow.

Sharing Snippets over the Cloud with iCloud/Pastefire, and Syncopy

But what if you don’t have a Mac? Or need something quick on someone else’s machine? Instead of having to download the Pastebot sync client, installing it, you’d rather have just emailed the file right? Well, turns out there’s two apps that take snippets to the cloud. You launch either the Pastefire or iCloud sites in your Safari browser. Signup involves entering your email and password—exactly as you would login. Paste in any text, and send it up to the cloud.

Here’s where the two differ. Pastefire requires you to access your snippets using their iPhone client app, which is free. iCloud requires you to go into Mobile-Safari, get into the iCloud website, login (it’s good at saving logins though), and then retrieve your snippet. Although Pastefire sounds better, I prefer iCloud’s free form way of sharing data. With iCloud you’re not tied to a particular iPhone, and your snippets stay online for much longer. Both apps understand what kind of data that’s been shared, and offer tricks like calling up the number, opening the url, or adding the picture to the iPhone picture gallery. Moreover, iCloud even lets you send snippets back up into the cloud, so you can receive snippets on your Mac or PC.

There is a third app in this equation, which is more like Pastebot than the other two cloud syncers. Syncopy syncs your clipboard very much like Pastebot does, except you don’t need to be on the same network. You can also have it synced with different Macs, so you can have clipboard access to your notebook and desktop. And lastly, it has a clipboard history independent of whether or not you have the app running on your iPhone. This opens up the possibilities since everything works in the background. That the app works based on a centralised server means you can use it to share clipboard between Macs as well. There are some downsides to this approach though. For one, your bandwidth is constantly being eaten up to transfer data into the cloud. Second, it only deals with text, so if you copy an image or file, only the filename is transferred. Third, it’s not nearly as instantaneous as Pastebot, you have to manually refresh the clipboard. Still, it’s a powerful application and service, in a relatively pretty UI, excellent price, and it works as advertised.

Sharing Photos over Wifi with WifiPhoto/PhotoToMac

For those in a constant state of review, sending screenshots back to the Mac is crucial. I could use Pastebot, but I’ll have to switch back and forth. Same for iCloud. There’s always email, but I thought we were trying to get away from email. Thankfully, WifiPhoto and PhotoToMac offer 1:1 transfer of images from your iPhone to a desktop. With WifiPhoto, you simply tap to select a bunch of images from your library, and then visit a special url in your browser on the same network. PhotoToMac instead mounts your iPhone as a drive right in your Finder, thereby allowing you direct access to those selected files. I prefer WifiPhoto because it has a no strings attached way of working with files—you just enter in the given url. PhotoToMac would make more sense if you’re using the same Mac all the time, since there’s a two minute setup involved.

Sharing documents over the Cloud with Notational/Simplenote

This one’s huge. Like it has literally changed the way I work with documents. I initially started off with using Notational Velocity for my writing work, but had yet to start using an iPhone client. I tried Notespark, Writeroom, Simplenote, but none of them really made sense to me since all my notes were with Notational (I later learnt that I could have synced with Writeroom using SimpleText.ws service). But ever since Notational started syncing with Simplenote, everything changed for the better. Now I have access to simple plaintext notes on my desktop, iPhone, as well as any web browser that has internet access. Notes sync over quickly without any issues, and the whole thing costs next to nothing.

Sharing *everything* over the cloud with Evernote?

No thanks. I’ve tried to like Evernote, and given its featureset, I should. But I just don’t. I’m sure many of you like it, and that’s fine with me. Why did I have to mention it? Because if I didn’t, there’s be a flurry of comments puzzled as to why it wasn’t included in the writeup.

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That pretty much covers everything in my workflow. I’m sure there are some avenues I haven’t covered, some workflows that might be superior to what I’ve described, and some things that are best left to plain old email. You’re most welcome to contribute your views on the subject. Before I finish however, I’d like to apologise for the terrible artwork in the header—it would have taken just too much trouble to do a slick one.