Staying in sync without a cable

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Since I typically have my iPad, iPhone and MacBook Pro close at hand, I tend to sync them a couple times each day. But I keep hearing about people who buy an iPad, sync it to get started and then rarely, if ever, plug it back into the computer. They use the included charger to top off the battery such as such as IBM 08K8197 Battery, IBM 92P1075 Battery, IBM ThinkPad R40 Battery, IBM ThinkPad R32 Battery, IBM 02K6928 Battery, IBM 02K7054 Battery, IBM ThinkPad A20 Battery, IBM ThinkPad A20M Battery, IBM ThinkPad A21M Battery, IBM ThinkPad 240 battery, and that's it.

I don't blame them. Where I used to check my laptop on the couch in the evenings, now I have my iPad nearby for getting up to date on email, Twitter, news — and now reading books or watching movies. The MacBook Pro stays in my home office.

Some things are firmly tethered to the sync cable: If you rent a movie from iTunes on the Mac and want to watch it on your iOS device, you need to do that using iTunes. It's also the only route to get system updates (such as the iOS 4.3.2 update from last week). Also, syncing is how you make a backup of your iOS device data in the event that something goes wrong.

(As an example of the latter, the battery in my original iPad went belly up. The Genius at the Apple Store couldn't even get the iPad to turn on enough to run a diagnostic. But since it was still under AppleCare, he gave me a replacement iPad on the spot. I was done in 20 minutes. At home, I synced the new device to my Mac and was able to pick up where I had left off the last time I synced.)

Those circumstances are sporadic, however; you can go days or weeks without syncing, which made me think about ways to share data between the Mac and iPad, iPhone or iPod touch without the sync cable. Here are a few examples of everyday tasks that you may not realize can be done wirelessly.

MobileMe. I subscribe to Apple's $99-per-year MobileMe service for automatically syncing my contacts and calendar events among multiple devices. The service also syncs Safari bookmarks, so anything I add on my Mac will appear in Safari on my iPhone or iPad. On your Mac, go to System Preferences and choose which data to synchronize in the MobileMe preference pane.

Handoff. For transferring more than just bookmarks, IdeaSwarm's Handoff app for iOS is a clever tool. On your computer, go to a Web page (in Safari, Chrome or Firefox), click the Handoff button that appears in the toolbar to send a current Web page to the Handoff app. On the iOS device, the page appears in the Handoff app, which you can then read or send to Safari if you choose. Handoff is $1.99.

PlainText. One of many text-editing tools for iOS, Hog Bay Software's PlainText is my current favorite, mostly because it syncs documents directly to Dropbox (the file sync software I've mentioned numerous times). I can start work on a document on my iPad (or iPhone, or iPod touch) and when I get to my computer, the document is stored in a PlainText folder within my Dropbox folder. As its name suggests, the file is a standard text file I can open with BBEdit or any other text editor or word processor.

Wunderlist. You'll find plenty of apps that help you track to-do items. Lately I've been using Wunderlist, which syncs items easily in an attractive, no-hassle interface. Changes made on the iOS device are synced to the Mac (or Windows PC, or Android client) and vice versa.

PhotoSync. To quickly transfer photos you've shot with your iOS device, turn to PhotoSync. You can configure the Mac client to import photos directly into iPhoto or Aperture, as well as copy them to a folder on your hard disk or send to a Dropbox folder. It can also send images via Wi-Fi or Bluetooth.

I have no doubt that at some point the iPad, iPhone and iPod touch will lose their reliance on being cabled to a computer. In the meantime, most of what you would want to do under normal circumstances is already unhooked.