Comments on: How to create offline webapps on the iPhone

By: pete

pete — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 08:09:33 +0000

we just had a similar problem with one of our apps. turns out a complete shutdown of the iphone and a restart did the trick. the cache is caching again properly.

By: Hansn

Hansn — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 07:54:28 +0000

Thanks, I’ll check with some people and post the result.

By: The Css Ninja

The Css Ninja — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 22:51:54 +0000

I can’t re-create your problem. I followed your steps exactly and it all worked fine for me? Have you got anyone else with an iPhone to try this demo out and follow your steps?

By: Hansn

Hansn — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 07:37:16 +0000

It pretty much the same but I get the same thing when I run your demo, long step by step with your demo:

1. Empty Safari cache, just to get a clean start…
2. Open Safari
3. Browse to Ninja demo, not loading the second page
4. Add to home screen
5. Open Safari
6. Close demo tab
7. Close Safari
8. Enable Airplane Mode
9. Run Ninja Demo with homescreen icon
10. Safari is opening a new tab, saying “Turn off Airplane Mode…”
11. Then saying “Cannot Open Page…”
12. Blank boring page showing

Something is very fishy here if you get the demo when doing this..

By: The Css Ninja

The Css Ninja — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 23:26:24 +0000

@Hansn – So I followed your steps of loading it in safari, putting it on the home screen etc. All works fine for me, loads the pages without issue and all the cached assets appear.

Have you changed the demo at all, or is it the exact same as my hosted demo?

By: Hansn

Hansn — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 11:29:43 +0000

Did a test and renamed your index.html to index1.html, created a new index.html with an onload redirect to index1.html just to have the home screen icon pointing to a file and not /. But I still get the same connection error. It feels like Safari is dumping the cache when the app is closed without having the page in it.. weird!

By: Hansn

Hansn — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 07:22:54 +0000

Cheers for the testing! What I’m trying to do is to cache a web app that’s added to the home screen. This shouldn’t be any different from opening a page in Safari (right?). But what do you get if you:

Open your demo, add it to the home screen, open safari, close the page, close safari and click the web app icon?

That’s my problem here, I always get a connection error, but maybe it has something to do with trying to open / vs /index.html as you said.

By: The Css Ninja

The Css Ninja — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 00:00:38 +0000

@Hansn – Hmm, I just tried it myself using my demo (I’m on an updated 3GS too), put it into airplane mode went back in to safari and reloaded the page and went to the second page without a problem. I also closed the window, opened a new one and typed in the address again and it loaded without issue all while still in airplane mode.

I did however get the connection error on the second page when clicking the “back to home” link, but I think that was because it was trying to load /index.html instead of just / and the fact that it isn’t added in the manifest. Looks like the cache gets confused when you try to link to the same file by using different names.

By: Hansn

Hansn — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 12:50:50 +0000

Great stuff! The demo is working and I created my own example from your info and that’s also working.

But, none of them work for me if I close the page in Safari and re-open, then I get a no connection alert from the browser and a blank page. Is this supposed to work like that? I don’t see the point if the user is not allowed to close the page in Safari..

Btw, using a 3GS with everything up-to-date.

By: The Css Ninja

The Css Ninja — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 23:28:43 +0000

@z3r01 – Xcode should take care of the referencing and creating of the manifest file so all you need to so is load the index.html page. If you look at the source there should be an attribute on the html tag i.e.