Full Screen Web App - iPhone

Has anyone seen this before?

Supposedly by using a simple html meta tag:

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

you can cause webpages saved to your iphone's home screen to launch using WebKit directly and not have Safari's address bar, bookmarks, etc. Might have to try it this weekend with some iphone formatted control pages.

Source:
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08/10/03/latest_iphone_software_supports_full_screen_web_apps.html

It does work, but it may not be what you want.

Where you put the line depends on how you have your system set up. I have all of my control pages linked to all the others (i.e. I don't need to use that control page list view to pick what I see) so I put the line in the IndigoWebServer/templates/controlpage.html file. If you would rather be able to use the control page list then you need to put the line in both the controlpage.html and the controlpage_index.html files.

You then load the page up in Safari and save a bookmark to your homescreen.

Clicking on the icon will take you to an 'app view' of the page (no browser bars). But, then it gets weird. Sometimes loading up a new page (with the meta line in it) will open in 'app view mode' and sometimes it won't.

But, the biggest problem (for me) is that 'app view mode' doesn't do rotation. I can use my control pages in portrait view by scrolling / zooming, but I've designed everything around a landscape view

[matt (support)]

For folks interested in trying this, here are the HTML file paths that need the new line:

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/Library/Application Support/Perceptive Automation/Indigo 2/IndigoWebServer/templates/controlpage.html
/Library/Application Support/Perceptive Automation/Indigo 2/IndigoWebServer/templates/controlpage_index.html

Restart the Indigo Server after making changes to the files.

Regards,
Matt

Yeah, may not be too useful.

In my short testing, it works well for the initial page you have the bookmark for on the home screen. But, once you try to follow a link to a another control page, you'll be thrown into safari to open the new page. I guess that makes sense, but isn't the behavior I really wanted. Oh well.

Time to remove the meta tag.

Rick

Hi everyone, I wanted to try this so I added that line ("<meta name="apple-mobile-web-app-capable" content="yes" />") to controlpage.html and added the bookmark (button) to my home screen. But the Safari UI is still there... any ideas? I know I'm missing something dumb because http://webapp.net.free.fr/Demo/Index.html works. And if I load my control page in Safari on my Mac, I can "view source" and see the meta tag. Help? Thanks.

Ok, we now have a new option. Check out the "Edge Browser" in the App Store. It only gives you the ability to access one bookmark, but it gets rid of the top and bottom navigation bars. The reviews are poor, but that's because they don't understand the niche this program fills. The concept works well for my setup where everything branches off a main control page.

Indigo Touch is really the ultimate answer, but you have to accept the fact that it sacrifices even more screen real estate than safari for its navigation bars (nudge, nudge ). Maybe we can persuade Matt to create "Indigo Touch Lite" that only displays control pages and gets rid of the navigation bars.