Transfer and view your images, directions and documents onto your iPhone like on a wifi Flash drive for free!

Mount your iPhone onto your Mac or PC, drag your documents, images, videos or spreadsheets, and view them on your iPhone/iPod Touch when you’re offline. No need to jailbreak or hack anything, easy as pie.

Two apps make it possible: Air Sharing and Discover. Below is a video tutorial on how it all works, and below the tutorial are the instructions on how to get this up and running.

Enjoy!

To mount your iPhone (or iPod Touch) on your Mac or PC (or Linux), you can either use Air Sharing ($4.99) or Discover (Free with ads). Here are the links to each one:

Air Sharing: http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=289943355

Discover: http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=292416855

While you can accomplish the same with both apps, Air Sharing has much better reviews, and it seems to be more clean and stable overall.

You can transfer any type of file to your iPhone drive, but not all files are supported for viewing. Here is a list of some of the supported types:

• Web Archive (saved Safari pages)
• HTML
• PDF
• RTF
• RTFD
• Plain text
• Source Code with syntax highlight (Javascript, C/C++, Java, XML, Perl, Ruby, Python and others)
• Movies (standard iPhone formats only)
• Audio (standard iPhone formats only)
• Images (PNG, JPEG, GIF, etc)

The instructions that come with both programs are easy to follow (post a comment if you need help), and at the end you will be able to access your files directly through a mounted folder, or through a browser like Firefox, IE or Safari.

Short falls

• At the moment iPhone OS 2.2.1 doesn’t let applications run in the background, so if your iPhone goes to sleep, the connection is OFF. You might want to turn off auto-lock if you’ll be transferring large files. In OS 3.0, this will hopefully be solved.
• Large image files can cause the apps to crash. I noticed that large PDFs run much better than large GIFs or JPEGs. You can make the simple conversion in Photoshop. Having a high-resolution map of state highways or the city transit system might be very handy.

Taking a screenshot

On a Mac, it is extremely easy to take a screenshot of your screen and have it be written into a file. Just press Command + Shift + 3 to take a screenshot of the whole screen, or Command + Shift + 4 to select which part of the screen you would like to capture. The file will then be written to your Desktop as Picture-#.png.

Screenshots:

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