I did a lot of job interviews in Milan lately and I needed a way to have the subway map handy when I was in a hurry and with no wifi… so why not saving it on the iPhone for offline viewing? Here’s the map I want to use!
I knew that some hacks allowed reading PDFs on the iPhone offline, but that required having some bookmarks in safari both on the iPhone and on the Mac, or to mail it to yourself, but those methods aren’t so practical!
Instead it is possible to create handy offline webclips on your iPhone by using some simple steps!
A webclip is simply a web link with an icon that the iPhone puts among the icons in your springboard. In this tutorial we will create a webclip that instead does not connect to the internet, but displays your document right away! Let’s get started!
1) Save a dummy webclip in safari on your iPhone. This could be anything, but try to create an icon that describes the contents of the file you want to open offline. For this map i started by pointing the iPhone to the online PDF and creating the webclip. In safari tap the add bookmark plus sign and choose ‘Add to home screen’. You must have 1.1.4.
2) SFTP into your iPhone (look here if you do not know how), go into /var/mobile/Library/WebClips, and locate the webclip you just created by viewing its icon.
3) upload your file in this web page and generate a looong address. Copy it in your clipboard. This URI encodes all the information of your PDF, only in a different format.
4) edit the Info.plist file and paste in the URI in the contents of the URL key! It may take some time for your editor to do that. Textmate crashed, so I used plist editor. Here’s a sample:
...
Title
MY OFFLINE WEBCLIP
URL
PASTE THE LINK HERE
...
5) Save and upload the hacked Info.plist file back to your iPhone (should be much bigger now) and try your new offline webclip! Sooooo handy!
is there any information about this in other languages, maybe german or other else?
I think that the method of converting a file into an URL for safari is rather common, so you could look for that in your language and use the method to have offline safari bookmarks.