Spot Documents (http://www.spotdocuments.com/) is a new alternative to Apple's iDisk, DropBox and other cloud based file storage systems, offering a desktop-like searching and browsing experience.

It leverages the security and redundancy of Amazon's S3. The iPad, iPhone, OS X and Web clients are all free to use. A single account can host multiple repositories, and any number of users can be assigned read only or read/write access to each repository.

"The 'hole' for Apple when it concerns documents is that there is no fast, simple way to browse and search a companies documents from iPhones, iPads and Web," says Spot Documents Founder Tom Anderson. "The current solutions from DropBox and iDisk, and others offer no content searching -- but perhaps more importantly, they offer no real icons or previews. Spot Documents offers icons and 'Quick Look' like previews as have become familiar and expected on the Desktop, extending these to the iPhone, iPad and Web clients."

Test driving the Mac, iPad and iPhone clients requires no sign up; running the app is all that's needed. Read/write repositories add many features, including the ability to edit documents using the appropriate editors. For instance with the web client, certain document types such as Word and PowerPoint can be edited on-line using zoho.com. Windows users can use the web client to access and upload documents at any time. Files can be emailed using time limited links.

Spot Documents scales to larger projects. Any type of file up to 5GB in size can be stored. A single account can host multiple repositories, each of which can hold up to 100,000-plus files.