Bookmark Any URL in Full Screen Mode on your Home Screen

nospam@example.com (Rudis Muizneks) — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 10:00:20 -0500

There was a lot of buzz when the iPhone OS 2.1 came out about the ability to run web applications without Mobile Safari. See this article at Apple Insider if you missed the news.

The only catch is that it will only work for web applications that have been specifically programmed for that functionality.

So what if you want to have the full-screen no-Safari functionality on web apps that haven't included the line of code that enables full-screen mode on home screen bookmarks (such as Google Reader? You have a few options...

You could write an email a day to the developer and beg them to implement it.
You could break in to the developer's home and steal their code, then implement the web application yourself with full-screen mode enabled.

...OR...

You could do it yourself by bookmarking your own simple HTML file that loads in full-screen mode, then redirects to the web application using javascript. I'll give the code to do this below, but note that it requires you to have your own hosting provider to put the html file up (any free one should work, preferably one that doesn't mess with the HTML to insert ads and whatnot).

Here's the code for a full-screen Google Reader:

01 <html>

02     <head>

03         <title>Reader</title>

04         <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width; initial-scale=1.0; maximum-scale=1.0; user-scalable=0;" />

05         <meta name="apple-touch-fullscreen" content="yes" />

06         <meta name="apple-mobile-web-app-capable" content="yes" />

07         <link rel="apple-touch-icon" href="http://www.google.com/reader/ui/iphone-icon.png" />

08         <script type="text/javascript">

09             //location.href='http://www.google.com/reader/i/';

10         </script>

11     </head>

12     <body>

13     </body>

14 </html>

Throw that file onto the web, browse to it in mobile safari, and add it to your homescreen. Voila! Full-screen reader, right? Not quite yet.

Note that on line #09 the javascript that redirects the browser to Google Reader is commented out. You have to do this initially in order to bookmark the page. After you've added the file to your homescreen, remove the "//" from line #09 and save the file in place of the one you bookmarked. From now on, when you click the homescreen icon for your file, it will load on your iPhone in full-screen mode, and redirect you to Google Reader instantly.

The nifty thing about this is that you can do it for any website at all, not just web applications. You just need to change the location line on line #09 to any URL you want. Other things you'd probably want to reconfigure for different apps:

The text of the <title> tag on line #03 is the default name of the icon when adding it to your homescreen (but you can change this on the fly when adding the bookmark anyway).

The "viewport" meta tag on line #04 should be ok for most web apps, but you might want to change or remove it for regular websites if you want to be able to pinch-zoom and scroll around on them.

The "apple-touch-icon" link on line #07 is the icon that the bookmark will display on your homescreen. You can point this to the webapp's real icon by copying it from their site, or create your own.

I hope you enjoy this brave new world of Safari-less web browsing!

One gadget to rule them all?

nospam@example.com (Rudis Muizneks) — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 00:25:06 -0400

The iPhone is tantalizingly close to my perfect device. I wanted it to replace three other gadgets that I used regularly: my 60gb iPod video, my Dell Axim x50v, and my ancient nokia cell phone.

The iPod and phone are no-brainers. I've also always wanted a GPS, so that's a bonus (even without turn-by-turn directions). I was a little hesitant about the move from 60gb to 16gb, but I can live with just a subset of my library, and Pandora more than makes up for it. The sticky point is the Axim. The iPhone needs a few things to be able to satisfactorily replacece my old PocketPC:

Birthday and Anniversary Notifications
The fact that it doesn't do this is, quite frankly, idiotic. You even have to jump through hoops to ensure all your birthdays and anniversaries show up in your calendar. The iPhone is broken until Apple does something about that.

File Management
Really, Apple? A device with beautiful image and text viewing and zooming abilities, with a full web browser, image browser, and PDF viewer—with no way to sync eBooks, images larger than 640x480, or PDFs? WTF? Fix plz.

Space Trader
Funnest mobile game ever. Nuff said.

Also! A night sky astronomy app that let you take a snapshot of the sky, and used the GPS and data service to identify the stars in the picture to tell you their names would kick ass.

Words That Never Were - iPhone

Bookmark Any URL in Full Screen Mode on your Home Screen

One gadget to rule them all?