Filemark Maker – put files on your iPhone

Filemarks let you store high res images, text files, and PDFs on an iPhone! There aren’t any good ways to do this with the built in Apple tools – you can use iPhoto to copy images, but they’ll be scaled down and become unreadable. If you want to read a pdf on your phone, you have to either email it to yourself or browse to it in Safari. Filemarks store your file’s data inside a bookmark. When you want to view your file, you open the bookmark in Safari on the iPhone and you can view it, whether your phone is online or offline.

Filemarks let you store much higher quality images than the built in photo application. Check out the difference between iPhoto and Filemark images with this New York subway map!

Introducing Filemark Maker

Download Filemark Maker Beta

Filemark Maker is a tiny Mac application that converts files into data URLs which you can bookmark and then open on the iPhone. The best thing about a Filemark is that they work even when your iPhone is offline, so if you’re in the subway or on an airplane, you can still view your files. It’s really easy to use. Here’s how to get started:

1: Download the Filemark Maker droplet beta.

2: Drop a file onto it and it will open a page in Safari with a link to the bookmark. It supports .doc, .xls, .rtf, .txt, .jpg, .jpeg, .png, .gif, .pdf, or .html.

3: Add that link to your Safari bookmarks and sync it to your iPhone with iTunes

4: Open Safari on the iPhone and open the Filemark!

If you’re not on a Mac, or just want to use a perl script instead of the droplet, you can grab our script here.

Other important stuff

Why can’t you just bookmark your Filemarks on the iPhone? You need to bookmark them on your computer and then sync. Trying to bookmark a Filemark on the iPhone will cause Safari to crash.

Are there file size restrictions? We haven’t found specific size limits, but the iPhone seems to dislike loading really big images…we crash consistently when we load a 4000 pixel wide image! We’ve had no problems reading pdf’s of books on the phone, though!

Will Filemarks work in Airplane mode? Yes! The data is all local, so you can open your Filemarks even if you can’t get to the internet.

PS:This is freeware – we’re not responsible for anything you do with it. Nobody is really sure what the effects of having giant bookmarks are going to be on Safari on your computer…it’s probably smart to back up your bookmarks before you try to push the limits of what you can save with this!

Why is a Tee Shirt company releasing an application? We’re really software developers who happen to have a Tee Shirt company too! We were working with our friend Jamie Wilkinson and ended up making this! We think it’s great, and hope you do too! Thanks to these guys for inspiring us.

Posted in News
27 comments on “Filemark Maker – put files on your iPhone
  1. I tried this with my Safari setup and it failed to open the generated HTMl and link in Safari. When you drop a file on the droplet it just opens and closes. I suspect it is because in order to have both Safari 2 and 3 running on my machine I have my safari 2 renamed “Safari2″ and I have Safari 3 beta and my daily webkit in my ~/Applications/ folder.

  2. Chris Barthelemy says:

    This is a great idea. Sadly it doesn’t work on y MacBook pro – the application starts when I drag an accepted file but then it stops without opening Safari.
    Any idea?

  3. David says:

    Hey Guys – thanks for the feedback!

    Even if Safari doesn’t open, the html file that should have opened in Safari is called output.html, and is right in the root of your hard drive. You can just open that html file in Safari and work from there!

    Update: I’ve updated Filemark Maker – it’s now storing the output in /tmp/FilemarkMakerOutput.html instead of the root of the drive. If the HTML file doesn’t open automatically, you can still open that to get to your bookmark!

  4. John Gruber says:

    Clever idea. But you shouldn’t be writing the temp file to the root level of the hard drive. I’m not even sure if non-admin users have write privileges there. You should write the temp file to a folder that’s meant for temporary items (/tmp/, for example, or ~/Library/Caches/TemporaryItems/).

  5. Chris Barthelemy says:

    The new version works just fine.
    Thank you very much, I have been doing this manually for a couple of weeks now to turn my ebooks into filemarks that I can use on my iphone and your software makes it so much easier.

  6. steve says:

    this app looks very cool – are you guys just mac programmers or can you make a pc version of it?

  7. Pascal says:

    How do you get the MTA map to look so good? I’ve downloaded the PDF map from mta.info, but I can’t get SafariPhone to let me zoom in on it very far. I can zoom to maybe 2x, but if I try to zoom any more than that it just snaps back.

  8. Evan Light says:

    This is absolutely terrific! Now if only we had a way to actually place bookmarks in our EBooks so that we could resume where we left off (even when Safari goes belly up)!

    Great job!

  9. ee says:

    haloo thanks for the app, I may have found a size limitation, maybe a bit more than originally intended for use…the batbook 3rd edition (sendmail) 9.6 mb and it never shows the link (it did on a pdf of lesser size). Is there a debug log?

    thx much,
    -ee

  10. david says:

    Downloaded your app, dropped a pretty nice sized screenplay PDF on it, synced and now reading it in Safari on my iPhone. Great!

    Now if only I could attach it to an email;)

  11. ee says:

    on another note, I just realized after actually looking at my 108 page file, it would be well difficult to nav through the 900+ pages in the batbook….

    cool little app though.

  12. Lee Katz says:

    Hi,

    1) When I drag a file (from the finder) to filemarker, safari opens a page that says right click.I click or double click
    2) I get a new file called unknown in my downloads.
    No idea what this file is – only opens as a text edit file and asks for BB edit.
    3) So then, I try bookmarking the safari window that filemarker has opened in the first place.
    4) I have a new folder in my bookmarks called “phone docs”. This is where I put the new bookmark of the page filemarker opened.
    5) sync the iPhone.
    6) get message that “Safari can’t open the page because it is a local file”
    What am I doing wrong?

  13. Stephen Ekker says:

    I’ve tried this on a macbook pro running 10.4.10 and the latest (beta) version of safari 3.

    In this setup, the file loads, I see the temp file designation in the URL field of Safari, but there is no ‘add link to bookmark’ option when I right click.

    When I manually ‘add bookmark’, sync, then open on my iPhone, I get ‘cannot open local file.’

  14. Rick Ahlgren says:

    I tried this with an InDesign file that uses Adobe Garamond Pro (Open Type Format) and Gill Sans MT (MonoType). I export using Acrobat 5 (PDF 1.4) and the PDF looks fine in Acrobat Reader and in Safari on the Mac. However, after I port it over to the iPhone, only the Gill Sans shows up — none of the Adobe fonts are there. The photos and Gill Sans look beautiful, but it’s just blank white space where the Garamond should be. Also, none of the hyperlinks — to other pages, or to URLS — work. I can live without that feature, though.

    Any ideas on the fonts? Or the hyperlinks?

  15. Stephen Ekker says:

    I have it working now – I was using a long filename for my file. When I shortened it, the transfer worked fine.

  16. Shawn McBee says:

    This is a fantastic app! For most of the formats, I’ll probably never need it…but for large PDF’s…oh, yeah. I currently have the Deathly Hallows on my phone. I’d already read it, but I wanted to see how well it’d work.

    Very happy, thanks!

  17. Paul Biba says:

    Very nice job! I posted a comment about it on Teleread.org/blog Here is what I said:

    This appication works just fine. I downloaded a 350 page PDF from fictionwise and dropped it onto the application. Sure enough a url was created – very fast, too – and I saved the link in Safari. When I synced my iPhone the link appeared in Safari on the phone.

    The file opened just fine and looked exactly the same as the file I downloaded through Box.net. The advantage of using Filemark seems to be that the file is kept on the phone, so if Safari crashes you don’t have to download the file again, like you do with Box.net.

    The disadvantage, of course, is that you can’t bookmark your page, so it is important never to close the Safari window which is displaying the book.

  18. thechansen says:

    Ok, this is a great little app. Thanks very much. The only other thing the iphone needs is some sort of bookmarklet to skip to a specfic page of a PDF.

  19. Letty says:

    works great. Does anybody have any idea how a PDF bookmark could be emailed as an attachment ?

  20. alba says:

    works for me. i’m just curious which map/file you got from the mta site, i downloaded the whole map (approx 511k) and i’m unable to zoom it to as close to what you have. did you download smaller sections?

    well done, by the way, and thanks.

    e

  21. Shawn says:

    Any chance someone out there can leave instructions on how to use this on Windows? I would very much appreciate it!

  22. quae says:

    quick question. so if this thing stores a image file on my iphone. how do i get that image file off my iphone once i don’t need it a anymore. I could delete the bookmark. but what happens to the image file?

  23. Very small image files worked fine for me, but .pdf files 3MB or 4MB in size crashed Safari on the iPhone.

  24. Will says:

    Hey David,

    For some reason it’s not working at all…I drag the link to the icon, it opens a black page in Safari with your notes on it (but no links), I bookmark it, sync, and when clicking on the bookmark in Safari on the iPhone, it just says “Safari can’t open the page because it’s a local file”

    Great, great program though, hopefully you’ve got some ideas….(could it have anything to do with using Safari 3?)

  25. Don_Ron says:

    Are you planning to release a windows version?

  26. David says:

    Hey quae,

    Deleting the bookmark will remove the file! Because there’s no file outside of the actual bookmark, there’s nothing else to delete.

  27. David says:

    Hey Rick,

    At first, I thought that fonts which aren’t on the iPhone by default might not work, but Gill Sans isn’t there, so that theory’s gone. Perhaps the fonts need to be embedded in the PDF file to work?

    I Don’t have a great answer for the hyperlinks, we’ll have to check it out.

    Dave

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