Hello folks,
¿Have you ever had a client ask you to be able to navigate his/her virtual tour offline from an iPad/iPhone? Well, I've just found a partial solution to this issue and I want to share it with you. I think this must be a common headache among all of us which often find clients to be very happy with their virtual tour, wanting to take it everywhere on their IPAD/IPHONE device, even though there isn't any internet connection, but, as we know, because krpano is mostly intended to be an online viewer, there isn't that simple to install our virtual tours to be viewed offline, less onto an Apple device.
Here's the tip, because Apple doesn't let users to upload files to an IPAD/IPHONE as easily as it would be with an usb (like it SHOULD be) restricting all file transfer to be done through their beloved iTunes, I've found some apps in the Appstore, known as "document managers", which can be used to sync our tour files with the iOS device and also to view them later offline. This apps work like a local file manager that can also read and display distinct file types, like pdf, jpg, and many more, the marvel with this apps is that they can read HTML files as well, and of course, that lots of them are free.
The detailed steps to "install" our krpano javascript/HTML5 tour into an Apple device with my tip go like this:
1) Open App Store in the IPAD/IPHONE, search and install the app "Documents by Readdle" (I like this one but there are plenty of other free file manager apps, you can find them by "documents" keyword)
2) From your computer ZIP all your tour files into one only file leaving tree structure as it is (remember you'll just navigate this locally from your iOS device)
3) Connect IPAD/IPHONE to computer, open iTunes and select your device from the DEVICES category in the left menu
4) Click onto Apps tab almost at the top of the window and scroll down the main window and search the File Sharing section
6) Select your document manager app from the list and drag and drop your tour ZIP file into the window to the right of it
9) From your IPAD/IPHONE open the document manager app and search for your zip file
10) Click to unzip it
11) Open your HTML initial file (index.html for example) and if everything went well you'll see your virtual tour is loaded from the iOS device like if it were online.
Hope to have been clear enough with this explanation, in a few words the tip is to use a "Document manager" app to read the html files locally into an IPAD/IPHONE device.
I haven't had the chance to test this method with iPhones, my 3G iphone is quite outdated and doesn't run any of the document manager apps I've tried, but, because the tour display is done by this apps I guess that this method should work without any problem onto newer iphones, if you can try it with this phones please share your results.
Tell me your experience with this method, if you know of other way to browse offline a krpano virtual tour please share.
Best regards
Luis