A few weeks ago I gave a five star reveiw to a product called FileMagnet, an iPhone/iPod touch application that lets you easily transfer document files such as PDF, JPG, DOC, XLS, PPT, and many others from your Mac to your iPod. A few days after the review ran, a similar product called Air Sharing appeared. In a nutshell, it does the same things FileMagnet does but has several distinct advantages.

1. It doesn't require a separate desktop application.
2. It isn't a Mac-only product -- it can be used with Windows, Linux, or any operating system that supports WiFi and offers a Web browser.
3. While it will sell for $6.99 (and be worth every penny) starting next week, there's currently a special introductory offer and Avatron Software is giving Air Sharing away for FREE!

So before you read any further, may I suggest you visit the iTunes store and grab your free copy before it's too late. (To do it now, just click here).

Now, here's how it works: Air Sharing uses an ingenious method to allow you to copy files from your computer to your iPhone/iPod touch -- just launch the program on your device and it makes your iPhone/iPod touch appear on your computer desktop as a shared disk. On the Mac, it's as easy as typing Air Sharing's IP address in the Finder's Connect to Server dialog (Go-->Connect to Server... or Command-K) as shown here:

Then, just drag files (or folders full of files) onto the shared volume and they are copied to your device. Then, you can view them in the Air Sharing application anytime you like.

Air Sharing's user interface is the model of simplicity. Tap any item in its file list. If it's a folder, it reveals its contents; if it's a file, it appears on the screen after a few seconds.

There's even a great shortcut that lets you navigate through your folders by tapping the navigation bar (the blue bar with "Resumes" in its middle in this image):

Air Sharing lets you view files of many types including:

• iWork (Pages, Numbers, and Keynote), at full resolution if you save them with a preview. Here's what a Pages document looks like on screen:

• Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, and PowerPoint), with limited support for XML formats. Here's an Excel worksheet:

• Web Archive (web-page downloads packaged by Safari) are particularly cool because links (such as Country List and World Factbook Home in the picture below) are live and display the appropriate page right in the Air Sharing application when you tap them.

• PDF

• Web page
• HTML
• RTF (Rich Text Format)
• RTFD (TextEdit documents with embedded images)
  
• Source code (C/C++, Objective C/C++, C#, Java, Javascript, XML, shell scripts, Perl, Ruby, Python, and more), with color-coded formatting
• Movie (standard iPhone formats: H.264, MPEG-4, 3GPP, etc.)
• Audio (standard iPhone formats: MP3 VBR, AAC, Audible, Apple Lossless, AIFF, WAV, CAF, etc.)
  
• Image (standard iPhone formats: GIF, PNG, JPG, TIFF, etc.)
• Plain text (many different file extensions), with Unicode support.

Speaking of plain text files, I like Air Sharing better than FileMagnet for their display. Since a picture is worth a thousand words, the one below should explain:

The Bottom Line

If you want to view files on your iPhone or iPod touch, you'd have to be an idiot not to download Air Sharing right away before the introductory offer (free) expires sometime next week. But even if you didn't manage to grab a free copy I still recommend Air Sharing, even at its regular price of $6.99.