Convert for Airplane Mode

Tips

Examples

Use these links to pre-fill the form with "known good" sites.

About

The iPhone has an "airplane mode" in which network access is disabled. Sitting on the airplane is a great chance to catch up on your reading, and the iPhone is the perfect device for it; but how can you do that if there's no network?

One solution is to use the "data URI," which (in a nutshell) allows you to store entire pages inside a single bookmark. But most pages are much too complicated for that to be easy, and anyway how would you make those bookmarks?

The airplanify hack does a very brutish conversion for you and presents its ridiculously oversimplified version of a page as a self-contained "data URI" page link. That link can be bookmarked, and if the bookmark lives on your iPhone then so does the page.

Further Development

One could obviously make a smarter airplanify, with better HTML parsing, some creative approach to images, auto-embedding CSS, converting PDFs and other convertible data, crawling pages for print version links or just for related things, and so on and so forth.

If someone was really ambitious, they might make an RSS news reader that can publish whole sets of these links and automatically bookmark them for you. If they were really really smart the program would use WebKit to render the pages first, so you could then do much better page translation via Javascript.

And if sites like NYTimes.com were smart, they'd publish these links on their own pages, thus letting them embed advertisements.

On the other hand, the whole issue would just go away if Apple had better caching on the iPhone. Software update anyone?

Related Links