iHacks: view files on your iPhone

Are you sick of your BlackBerry owning friends crowing about their ability to view spreadsheets, word documents and the like? Well, with a quick hack, you can do the same, and then boast about how your screen is bigger and you can see more of the document at once. And then you can crow about how you can zoom in on the document by pinching, see more of a document by rotating your iPhone and generally be cooler than them. Here's how to do it.

Unfortunately, the iPhone does not allow you to upload files other than songs and videos to the device, so you can't just copy the files over. Instead, this hack uses the Safari Web browser that is included with all iPhones. Unlike most mobile web browsers, this is a fully fleged browser that uses the same code base as the desktop Safari Browser, including the ability to view data that is embedded in a bookmark. Sorry, PC users: this hack is for Mac users only at the moment.

What you'll need:

• The Mac program Filemark Maker from insanely great tees.
• A Microsoft Word, Excel, rich text format, text. JPEG, PNG, PDF file or Web page. PDF files seem to work best.
  

How to do it

1. First, download and install FileMark Maker. The installation program will create a droplet on your desktop.
   
2. Next, drop the file you want to copy to your iPhone onto this bookmarklet. The program will convert the file into a special format, and open up Safari with a link to this format.
   
   
3. Right click on the specified link in Safari, and bookmark the link. I created a new folder for these bookmarks, to keep them separate from the bookmarks for things like the BBC, wirelessinfo.com, etc....
   
4. Make sure your iPhone is set to synch bookmarks; click on the iPhone in the devices section of the iTunes, then click on the info tab and scroll down to the Web Browser section. Make sure that Sync Safari Bookmarks is selected.
   
5. On your iPhone, go into the web browser and open the bookmarks tab, then open the link you created. After a few seconds of contemplation, you should see your document pop up, and you can browse and scroll around it like any other web page.
   
6. Find a BlackBerry user and show them the spreadsheet they look at on their tiny screen on the big, bright screen of the iPhone, complete with zooming, scrolling. Pat them on the shoulder reassuringly as they cry.

There are a few things to bear in mind here, though; you can't edit the documents, and we did have some problems with some spreadsheets not converting properly. This seemed to happen a lot with more complex spreadsheets and documents, so you should test your documents before you start showing them off. Some complex spreadsheets also seemed to cause Safari on the iPhone to loose the will to live, so it works best with simple files. We actually found it easier with most files to save them as PDF files (all Mac applications can do this by printing them as PDFs), then use the PDF file as the one to convert. Seeing as you can't edit the documents, you don't loose anything.

FilemarkMaker is still in beta as well, so it's worth keeping an eye out for newer versions that may deal with some of these issues.
This technique also works well with HTML files, and this allows you to browse HTML pages when the iPhone isn't getting a signal, or when it is in airplane mode.

[Filemark Maker originally spotted on TUAW]