Enterprise Mac | Tom Yager » How to store files in iPhone for off-line viewing: E-mail them to yourself

July 10, 2007 | Comments: (0)

How to store files in iPhone for off-line viewing: E-mail them to yourself

TAGS: Consumer and lifestyle, Design and engineering, Software, iPhone

iPhone Web apps can't use iPhone's internal file system. Storage has to be handled on the server end, which makes off-line viewing of documents and Web pages challenging.

However, there is a solution to this that I haven't seen discussed elsewhere. Web sites that want to persist data should e-mail it to the user. Word, Excel, PDF and HTML attachments are directly viewable from inside iPhone's mail app while iPhone is not on the network. The mail app warns you that you can't access data while off the air, but you can ignore it. Attachments are downloaded. Hyperlinks with long parameter lists can stand in for off-line storage. I created a special e-mail alias that I set aside solely for that purpose.

You can't insert pointers to other e-mail messages, and there is still no way to access iPhone files directly.

You can also use e-mail to create a desktop of sorts containing icons for sites and Web apps you use often. Bookmarks in Safari are text-only, but an HTML page in Mail can use IMG hyperlinks just fine.

Posted by Tom Yager on July 10, 2007 10:38 AM

RATE THIS ARTICLE: