I wanted to be able to browse code on the bus going to and from work. So I asked Stack Overflow for a suggestion and got two answers: Air Sharing and Mobile Me. I decided to go with Air Sharing because I like paying the fixed price of $4.99 instead of being sucked in by the free trial.

The way it works is you connect to your iPhone from your Mac via Wi-Fi, copy your files and folders to your phone and browse them anywhere thereafter, even offline.

I've had a very good experience with it so far: it can read most well-known file formats including pictures, PDFs, Word, Excel and even source code. I can load the django source tree and read the code whenever I'm thinking about implementing a solution. It even colors the code.

In my opinion, well worth the money. Here is the click by click:

• Buy and download Air Sharing:

• Make sure the phone and your laptop are on the same wifi network. I recommend doing this at home on your secure network.

• Start the app and click the Done button

• Click the wheel with spokes on it

• Write down the IP address (for example http://192.168.1.113:8080) of your phone as is displayed just below the Port field

• Go to your Mac and connect to your phone by clicking and holding the Finder icon and selecting Connect to Server...

• In the Server Address box, enter your phone's IP address (for example http://192.168.1.113:8080) and click Connect

• Drag and drop the folders you want to see, wait for the transfer to complete (it's quite slow)

• That's it! go to the Air Sharing app and browse your files

Some parting words: one can never be too careful with security, so if you're going to be putting sensitive files on here you'll want to do 2 things:

1. Enable Require Password under Sharing Security and enter a password. You can put files in your Public folder and enable Public Access if you want them accessed by guests.
2. Click Passcode under Application Lock to set a code needed to access the device

Also, if you have a PC you can use your browser to connect to your phone: just type the phone's IP address (that you found in the Air Sharing app's settings screen) in the browser's URL bar.If you like this but want to do more than just read (for example move files or sync with Mobile Me), you may want to look into the pro version, which does all that.