Have you ever searched the App Store for Django apps? Don’t bother, as of this post there is only one that will come up: Django Documentation. Since it was only 99 cents, I bought it a few weeks back and I wouldn’t recommend that you do the same. It is simply the online Django documentation “formatted” for the iPhone and iPod Touch.
Guess what? If you use your iPhone to browse to the Django documentation page with your free Mobile Safari app you’ll also get the Django documentation “formatted” for you iPhone or iPod Touch, and you’ll also get the ability to bookmark pages, easily go forward and back in your page history and zoom in and out on text.
For the past couple weeks I’ve had the paid app sitting side-by-side with a Safari bookmark on my iPhone:
Paid app on far right, standard bookmark to the left of it, new bookmark to the left of that
My only problem with adding the Safari bookmark to the home screen? The ugly default icon it creates. For some reason, it *really* bothers me. Sure, it’s an accurate representation of the page it bookmarks, but it doesn’t make for a very good icon.
What I have done — and you can see it immediately to the left of the Safari bookmark — is create a front page to the standard Django docs so when you bookmark it, it makes a presentable icon suitable for the iPhone. The downside is that when you click on this icon, you go to that front page and then have to click the huge “dj” button to get to the docs. For me, however, this is worth it.
If you care about the appearance of your iPhone icons and want to have the Django docs on your own phone, do the following:
- open Mobile Safari
- browse to http://be73.com
- click the “+” icon on the bottom of the screen
- click the “Add to Home Screen” button
- click “Add”
Done. May my fellow OCD suffers rest easily tonight.
UPDATE: In the comments Phillip Bosch points out that I can use a more standard <link rel=”apple-touch-icon” href=”django-icon.png”> to produce an even better icon. Using this, I have iframed the django docs, so clicking on the icon goes directly there while still producing a nice iPhone/touch-friendly icon. Thanks Phillip!
Related posts:
- Getting Started with South (Django Database Migrations)
- Show a Custom 403 Forbidden Error Page in Django
- Errata: Practical Django Projects 2nd Edition (PDF)
- Getting Started with virtualenv (Isolated Python Environments)
- New Django site: polurls.com
9 Responses to “Django Documentation for the iPhone”
This is great! Exactly what perfectionists need. Can you not submit the icon back to Django and harass them to add it to the homepage themselves?
Not working for me. I see the first page with the big “dj” but then it redirects to the main page of the documentation. When I try to save the page to my screen, the icon that is created has the documentation on it, not the “dj”. This happens on both my iPad and iPod touch.
My fault for adding in the meta refresh and preventing you from bookmarking the front page vs. the redirect page. Stupid error on my part, sorry. The refresh is gone now.
Many thanks, but I also just get a link to the standard docs page. What “formatting” should be expected?
Why not use the standard way of including the icon using ?
Ok, HTML markup was broken.
It should read [link rel="apple-touch-icon" href="my-icon.png"] – replace the brackets with lt and gt.
Thanks Philipp, didn’t know that was an option. Trying that out now. (love the domain and email, btw)
There is an iPad “formatted” documentation available also in the app store.
Or, zoom in on e.g. The logo before adding the page to your home screen. But it does mean you need to zoom out again when you load the page.