I recently looked for a way to get to my iDisk (part of MobileMe) from my iPhone and found a free app on Apple’s App Store, called MobileFiles which does exactly that.
MobileFiles can access your local files on the iPhone and multiple MobileMe iDisks, including your friends public folders. When you drill down to an actual file in the folder structure you can view many of the documents. Supported are:
- Images: .jpg, .jpeg, .png, .tif, .tiff, .gif and .svg
- Microsoft Word: .doc and .docx
- Microsoft Excel: .xls and .xlsx
- Microsoft PowerPoint: .ppt and .pptx
- Adobe Acrobat: .pdf
- Web Pages: .htm and .html
- Web Archive: .mht
- Text: .txt
- Audio: .mp3
The only thing I’m missing on this list is .mov, which happens to work nonetheless. You can view the above files, but – not yet – edit them. Viewing is possible in regular or landscape view, although there seems to be a display error in the latter. The top of a file was missing a few pixels, while there was a black bar at the bottom of the screen. The developers at Quickoffice, the creators of MobileFiles, are working on an app that will let you edit Microsoft Office documents on the iPhone.
You can mark multiple files that should be downloaded to your device for faster access or to simply get them from a friends public MobileMe folder. It’s only possible to mark multiple files for download, getting a whole folder isn’t possible. You have to go into the folder a mark each file for download.
Another thing that MobileFiles doesn’t support is sharing the files on the device on your local network, like AirSharing does for example. The combination of these two apps makes it possible to get your online files to the iPhone and from there to your notebook in case you’re without any internet connectivity besides your iPhone (Note: tethering would be great at this point).
Overall MobileFiles is a useful app which comes a great price: it’s free. You can see some screenshots of the app in the following gallery. Enjoy!