So what's this all about?
As you maybe know, simple web pages can appear as 'normal' apps on your iPhone (or iPod touch) when you add them to your home screen using Safari's '+" menu. With some changes to the web site you can enhance the 'app feeling' even further. You can:
- Give it a nice icon
- Add a startup screen which appears when clicking the icon on your home screen
- Hide the Safari address bar and the menu
But what if you cannot change the web site (as it might not be yours)? Thanks to appify you are not out of luck. With appify you can add a new starting page to the web site of your choice, and adds all of the nice features I just listed. And after displaying this starting page, your web page is loaded.
Simply fill out the form above. If you want a nice icon and a startup image, you need to refer to one on the net. You cannot upload one here, sorry. (But you can use free services like Picasa Web Albums). After pressing the appify button you will get a (rather long) link. Open that on your iPhone (or make the link shorter first), safe the page to your home screen and your are done.
Note: All of this is nice but has one drawback: When you click on a link on your appified web page, the iPhone will close the app and open the new page in Safari. This doesn't happen with AJAX web apps where you do not have 'normal' links. So appify might not be too useful for many web pages :-(. But it works great for e.g. gmail.
For more technical info about appify or if you want to give feedback, please visit my blog.