iPhone Soapbox

While I have written about this topic before, I will keep writing about it until iPhone users are better served. The topic is syncing between the iPhone (and iPod touch) and a personal computer.

Apple previewed features we will get when the 3.0 version of the iPhone OS is released. This includes better search, cut copy & paste, standard applications that are better, and much more.

But, they have provided no standard way to sync data between the iPhone and the computer. Yes, they are adding syncing for their own Notes application, but we need a standard way that can be used by all applications. Send PDFs to the iPhone for viewing, create documents in various applications and have those docs synced back to the computer. This is all needed now to make the iPhone a real platform.

Even FileMaker's Bento, just released on the iPhone has had to resort to customized syncing using the always unreliable Bluetooth connection.

I have made this suggestion before, and still see it as a possible solution. Apple should create a documents folder that all applications can access. The folder would be protected, and absolutely no execution of code could take place from this folder. But, documents intended for syncing back to the computer could be written to this folder by any application, and iPhone apps could read documents synced from the computer to this folder. Syncing would be handled by the iTunes application on the user's computer. The user would identify a synch folder on the computer, and iTunes would sync the contents of this folder with the contents of the corresponding iPhone folder.

This would allow iPhone apps to act as viewers for whatever docs the user places on the iPhone. Data base files could be synched back and forth. Documents could be created on the iPhone and synced back to a computer for further work. Apple could provide specific APIs for handling data to and from this shared doc folder, while maintaining control of how the folder is synced; via Bluetooth, WiFi or the iPod dock connector.

Maybe Apple doesn't like this, because it will provide a poor man's form of communication between iPhone applications. But, doing something along these lines makes sense and we need it now!