Offline web pages on iPod Touch

One of the things that I really liked about my Palm was using Plucker to view web pages when I’m not connected to the Internet. I’ve found a few apps for the iPod Touch that do this and here are the ones I’ve tried and what I think about them.

I read all of my news using Google Reader and so I wanted an app that would sync with it and keep the articles offline so that I could read them later. I tried Byline and MobileRSS. Both are good RSS readers, however I’ve found that I prefer MobileRSS. The syncing of all messages and ability to scan through all messages easily is great. Also MobileRSS allows one to send web pages to multiple other services, twitter, email, safari, Instapaper, Read It Later, etc. I’m currently using the free version and it works nicely. I’ll probably upgrade to the pro version to get rid of the ads eventually.

For generic web pages I started out using iWebSaver favelet. This favelet takes a given web page and sends it through the iWebSaver favelet site and produces a data page that can be stored on your IOS device. This data page is then opened in Safari when you want to view it. The advantage to this is that you have the whole page as is downloaded onto your device. The problem is that it takes a long time to load and doesn’t remember where you are in the page.

Next I tried Instapaper. This has worked very well for most pages. I’ve been very happy with the scaled down version of web pages. However I found that my Bible study had a problem with rendering. I couldn’t see the days. I’m guessing this is some CSS magic that gets stripped out by Instapaper as extra visuals.

I then gave Read It Later a try. At first I thought that it wasn’t going to help because the stripped down page looked the same as Instapaper and my Bible study still didn’t work. However then I noticed a button at the bottom of the page with a ‘T’ on it. It turns out that this toggles the page from the stripped down text version to the full page. With a little reading through the options I found that if I disable auto picking of the “right” format to download I can have Read It Later always download both the text and full versions of the page. Then when I’m offline I can toggle between the two. This allows me to view most pages in text and then pages like my Bible study as the full page.

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