iPhone offline reading

Question

Hi,

first of all - I am quite new to iPhone App development (3 months). I am working for a software company that offers a content management system. Our customers are for the main part publishing houses for magazines. They use our software to write articles to their homepages. Now we want to offer iPhone Applications to go with our cms. What I have accomplished so far is an RSS reader that shows newly published articles in a list view. The user selects one article and is redirected to a specially formatted detail view of this article. The next step is to add offline reading capabilities. I have searched the internet up and down but couldn't find anything like a best practice for that. I get it that there are two possibilities in general:

1. Store the contents of the uiwebview locally on the iPhone/iPad (including css, images, js and so on). There would be the need to rework the basic html to use the downloaded css, images and js. Also I would have to somehow edit hyperlinks to following pages in multipage articles - Sounds like a lot of work ;)

2. Create a PDF on the server side and download that to the mobile device. Rework the RSS Source to point to the locally saved pdf instead of the website on the server.

My question is - what is the better way to go? Are there any downsides for either of the possibilities? Are there other (simple ;)) ways to implement offline reading features? Are there possibly any howto's that I could've missed?

Thanks y'all!

Answer 1

Maybe, you should think about the third variant: make some server-side API to get/set necessary data and create separate iPhone app that uses this API.

I think iPhone app should be closer to native apps - this way you can provide more convenient interface to manage tasks - it will be more usual for iPhone users and will take into account advantages and disadvantages of device and mobile platform in whole.