WildEyes: New iPhone Document Viewer App from Databinge
WildEyes is a new iPhone document viewer app, that makes use of Mobile Safari’s ability to display a good variety of document types. WildEyes is developed by Databinge, who are responsible for the excellent TimeCapsule iPhone backup app – and currently lets you view the following document types:
- doc, docx
- xls, xlsx
- text files
- images
There are a number of solutions out there for viewing documents in this way on the iPhone, but WildEyes has quite a nice UI and feel to it. And if ti’s anything like TimeCapsule, we’ll see frequent updates and additional feature additions. The program uses ~/Sites as is primary directory, but it will also let you view any documents stored under your main user path – either /var/root or /var/mobile depending on which firmware and jailbreak method you’re on.
The other requirements for using the program are that you need to have the BSD Subsystem and Lighttpd installed. BSD Subsystem is found under the System Category in Installer, and Lighttpd is under the Network section.
WildEyes is available now on Installer. You may need to add the Databinge source to Installer to see it, which is:
http://repo.databinge.com
Tags: WildEyes, iPhone document viewer, document viewing, pdf, doc, iPhone native apps
Nice find! I’ll have to try this one out since I can’t get PDF Viewer to work for me, for some reason. Does it allow you to bookmark pages, or at least open a document to the last page viewed? I’ve got an ebook PDF with over 300 pages, and I can’t bear flicking through the whole thing to get to the last page I was reading every time I open it up…
macgirl – The app’s developer might correct me, but I think there is no in-built bookmarking functionality, as it uses Mobile Safari to actually do the viewing of docs.
But … this reminded me that one of the touted features of webclips is that they will remember your specific place on a page etc. I’d never played with that feature much, but just tried it out with a 19 page .pdf doc. I created a web clip while on the first para of Page 11 of the doc. Then cleared Safaris’ cache and rebooted the iPhone just for kicks. Launched the webclip and was happily back at my exact place in the doc.
once installed and once you start adding all the .pdf and documents, wouldnt that free of space quickly, even with large files placed in var/mobile
dannythomson – good point. I think you need to think about having maybe some docs that are permanent good reference items (if you need any) and then some which are just copied over to the iPhone when needed, and deleted afterwards – depending of course on what your overall free space situation is …
exactly patrick, Ive also uploaded all pds and docs and everything to my website server then just open up those in safari, but im sure they take longer to load and all, but it does sure save alot of space. Thanks Thou