The 10 Things you can do with the Documents App for iOS

Readdle’s Documents 5 is one of my favorite iOS apps. It is completely free, without any ads or in-app purchases, and app is universal meaning it is optimized for both the iPhone and the iPad.

The Documents app is hugely popular on the iTunes Apps Store but do you really know about the different things you can do with this versatile app. For starters, Documents is a document viewer but if you are only using the app for reading your PDFs, you’ve only scratched the surface. Here’re a list of things that you can do with Documents on your iPad or iPhone.

1. As a document viewer and media player

You can use the Documents app to open a wide variety of files on your iOS device. It supports PDFs, images, common audio & video formats, Microsoft Office documents, EPUB ebooks and even HTML web pages.

2. For transferring files between computer and iOS

If your computer and iOS device are connected to the same Wi-Fi network, you can quickly transfer files of any type wirelessly between the computer and iOS device without any limitations. Open the Documents app, enable Wi-Fi Drive under Settings and enter the provided IP address (or Bonjour name) in your computer’s browser.

3. Access your Cloud Storage

Documents can connect to your Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive and other online storage accounts. Thus you can easily access all your files stored in the cloud from one place.  Single tap any file and it will download to your iOS device for offline access. You can even download and store entire folders from the cloud inside your Documents app with a tap.

4. Upload and Sync Files

You can can upload files of any type from the Documents app to your Dropbox or Google Drive by drag and drop. Long press a file inside Documents and drop it over any connected cloud account available in the sidebar. You can also enable 2-way sync so a folder inside Documents will always stay in sync with a specified folder in your cloud storage (or an FTP server).

5. Save Web Pages as PDFs

The Documents apps has a built-in web browser that, like Google Chrome, can save pages directly as PDF files while preserving the layout and formatting. Alternatively, you can choose the download the page as a raw HTML file or use theWeb Archive format that saves the HTML, CSS and JavaScript in a single file.

6. Download Internet Files on your iOS Device

The web browser on your iPhone or iPad does not allow direct file downloads. Thus if you try opening a link that points to, say, a .WMV video or .RAR archive file, the browser would neither be able to handle the file nor would give you an option to save that file. You can however use the browser inside Documents to download any file from the Internet – just paste the file URL in the address bar and it will prompt you to save the file locally.

7. Mail more than 5 Photos

Apple has imposed a strange limitation in their Mail app and it won’t allow you to select and email more than 5 pictures from the Camera Roll in a single message. You can however get around this limitation with the help of Documents.

1. Either allow Documents access to your Camera Roll, tap and select any number of pictures now and use the mail option to send the selected pictures via the Mail app.
2. Alternatively, you can import pictures into a folder inside Documents, select them all and choose the ZIP option to create a single archive which you can attach to your email.

8. Move files between iPad and iPhone

If you happen to carry multiple iOS devices, you can use Documents to move files from one device to another. Open the app on both devices, go to Network and connect to the other device. It will be listed under Available devices when both your iPhone and iPad are on the same network. Now select the files and folders that you wish to send to another iOS device and tap upload.

9. As a text editor

While you are in the Documents app, tap the Edit button and choose “Text file” under the Create New menu. You get access to a notes editor that supports both plain text as well as rich text formatting. You can create text file as well as edit existing ones.

10. Fake your browser

Some websites may refuse to open on your iOS because they do not support Safari. You can easily get around this problem by opening the site inside Document’s browser and changing the user agent to a supported browser. This is a useful feature and is not available inside Chrome or Safari for iPhone and iPad

Save SlideShare Presentations as Animated GIFs

A new web called GIFDeck helps you convert any presentation hosted on SlideShare into an animated GIF file. All you have to do is specify the deck URL and the app will fetch the individual slides as images and stitches them all together in a single GIF that will auto-play and auto-loop.

Here’s a sample GIF created from a SlidShare presentation on Steve Jobs. The app only converts the initial 10 slides, probably to keep the size of GIF within limits, but you do have an option to queue all the slides of a deck for conversion.

While SlideShare does offer an HTML5 based option to embed presentations on external websites, the GIF based approach will still come handy in many situations. For instance, you can send your presentation in an email message – just drag the GIF in your Gmail compose window – and recipients will be able to scan through the deck right inside their email client.

Similarly, you can tweet the GIF or post it on Tumblr and the people can quickly view your slides in any browser or email client. Unfortunately, Facebook doesn’t support animated GIFs yet.

Internally, the GIF Deck app uses the GIF.js library to convert the individual deck images into a GIF image. The library supports all modern web browsers and it does the conversion in the client’s browser.

The only downside is that the generated GIF images aren’t optimized so if you are trying to convert an image-heavy presentation into a GIF, the image file could easily run into a few megabytes. The app’s source code can be found on Github.

Write Emails in HTML and Send them through GMail

The all-new HTML Mail app lets you compose and send emails using the new Gmail API. You can sign-in with your Gmail account and compose emails using the WYSIWYG editor, or if you are comfortable with code, switch to the HTML mode and write messages in HTML and CSS directly.

The HTML Mail app sends emails using your own Gmail account but unlike the previous versions, it does not require full access to your Google Account. It only needs permission to compose and send messages on your behalf and would not be able to read anything else in your mailbox. The app is open-source but you can always revoke access from your Google Accounts page.

Why should I use HTML Mail

While Gmail itself offers an excellent visual editor for composing emails, the big difference between Gmail and HTML Mail is that the latter lets you write and style emails in HTML directly. For instance, there’s currently no way to insert a table in Gmail’s but you can easily do that in the HTML Mail app – either use the Table tool from the toolbar or switch to the code view and add the <table> tag manually.

Also, if the Gmail.com website ever goes down in the future even for a few minutes, it happens sometime, you should still be able to use the HTML Mail app to at least send messages via your Gmail account during that downtime.

If you wish to embed images, or even social media icons, in your email messages, you can upload them to a site like imgur.com and put the URL of the uploaded image into the “Insert Image” box.

Once you are done composing an email message in the HTML Mail app, enter the subject and the recipient’s email address and hit Send Email. The number of emails that can send per day is the same as your daily Gmail limit.

And there’s a full screen mode as well to help you write emails in a distraction free zone. The visual editor is internally powered by TinyMCE with some CSS tweaks.

How to Collect Email Leads from Twitter in a Google Spreadsheet

One of the best features of Twitter that is relatively unknown to most users is their Lead Generation cards. Your tweet, see live example, will have a button and when another Twitter user clicks the button, their email address is sent to your application (which happens to be a Google spreadsheet in this case).

Whether you are a small website owner or an event organizer, you can use these Lead Generation cards to easily collect email addresses from Twitter users who may be interested in your product. For instance, Twitter users can subscribe to your email newsletter with a click without leaving the Twitter website. Event organizers can use Twitter’s Lead Generation Cards to capture email addresses of people who may be interested in attending an upcoming event.

Integrate Twitter Lead Generation Cards with Google Sheets

The Lead Generation Cards are available to all Twitter users who have a Twitter Ads account – get yours at ads.twitter.com – and there are no costs involved. This tutorial explains how you can create a Twitter Lead generation card and capture all the email addresses in a Google Spreadsheet. Other than the email address, the screen name and the full name of the Twitter user is also collected in the spreadsheet. Let’s get started:

1. Prepare the Google Spreadsheet

The first thing we need to do is create a Google Spreadsheet that will be used to store the details of Twitter users. This sheet will internally contain a Google Scriptto connect the sheet and your Twitter card.

This is easy. Click here to make a copy of the Google Sheet in your Google Drive. Once the copy is created, go to the Tools menu in the sheet and choose Script Editor. Here choose Start from the Run menu and follow the wizard to authorize the script. Next choose Deploy Web App from the Publish menu.

On the Deploy screen (see the screenshot above), click the Save New Versionbutton and change the access permission from Only Myself to Anyone, even anonymous. Click the Deploy button and you’ll get a script URL that you should note down somewhere as we’ll require it in the next step.

2. Create the Twitter Card for Email Leads

Go to your Twitter Ads dashboard, click on Creatives in the navigation bar and choose Cards. Here click the big blue “Create Lead Generation Card” to create a new Twitter Card. You can add a description to your card, upload a 800×200 pixel image that will show up with the tweet and give your button a name (Call to Action).

Next expand the Data Settings group and paste the Google Script App URL (that you generated in the previous step) in the Submit URL field. Choose the HTTP method as POST from the drop-down, agree to the terms and hit submit to create your first Twitter card.

That’s it. You can put the Card’s URL – see example – in a tweet and your Twitter followers will be able to share their email address with a click that is directly saved in your Google Sheet.

If you are web developer, you can further enhance the Google Script to do even more advanced stuff. For instance, if you have published a premium PDF report, you can allow Twitter users to download the report after they choose to share their email address. The script will trigger as soon as someone submits the email address and it will send a mail to the user with the PDF attachment using the Gmail API.

Restrict Google Forms to only Allow One Entry Per Person

You have created a survey using Google Forms but people have quickly figured out a way to game your poll and tilt the results in their favor. They are submitting multiple entries, and because Google Forms will not record the I.P. address or the email of the form submitter, it is nearly impossible for you to separate the duplicate submissions from the genuine entries.

How do you restrict Google Forms to only allow a single entry from a user?

If you are a Google Apps user, you can always restrict the Google Form to accept entries only from users who are part of your domain and the response spreadsheet will then record the username of the form submitter. However if you have a regular Gmail / Google Account, you have another option now to prevent multiple form submissions from the same user.

While creating the Google Form, click the Settings bar and turn on the option that says “Allow only one response per user.” When the unique option is enabled for a Google Form, respondents will have to sign-in with their Google account to access the form. Their email address won’t be recorded in the response sheet but Google Form will not allow another entry from the same Google Account.

If someone tries to fill the Google Form again, a warning message will be displayed saying “You’ve already responded. You can only fill out this form once. Try contacting the owner of the form if you think this is a mistake.”

This is by far the easiest approach though it does put your Google Form out of reach of people who do not have Google Account or those who are skeptical of associating the email address with their form entry (though this association is completely hidden from the form owner).

Add Collaboration Features to your Website with a Line of Code

Tools like Google Docs include real-time collaboration features that let multiple people work on the same document or spreadsheet at the same time. Then you have screen sharing tools, join.me or Chrome Remote Desktop for example, where there’s a master presenter and remote viewers can follow along.

TogetherJS is a Mozilla project that brings similar collaboration features to your own website but without any coding. Once enabled, visitors to your website will be able to interact with each other on your site in real time.

They’ll able to see each other’s cursor (like in Google Docs), the clicks are highlighted and the screen content stays synchronized. Visitors will also have the ability to text chat and audio chat (using WebRTC) with each other while staying on your website. All this and more with a line of code.

Add TogetherJS to your own Website

To get started, all you have to do is insert a little JavaScript snippet anywhere on your web page(s). There are several configuration parameters available for the widget but we will use the default settings to keep things simple.

<script>
  TogetherJSConfig_autoStart  = true;
</script>
<script src="https://togetherjs.com/togetherjs-min.js"></script>

This will add a little floating widget to your website that will be visible to all visitors. They can click the “+” button in the widget to generate a unique TogetherJS URL. Anyone who clicks this URL will be able to interact with each other on your page in real time. It can’t get any simpler.

I have put up a quick page where you can test TogetherJS capabilities. Click the “+” icon and send the unique URL to another person to chat in real-time.

Add TogetherJS to any Website

There’s more. You can add TogetherJS features to any web page on the Internet with the help of a bookmarklet.

TogetherJS

This bookmarklet will load the TogetherJS library on the current web page and you can give the chat session a unique name. Another person can launch the bookmarklet on the same page on their own computer, enter the same session name and you’ll be instantly connected.

You can co-browse, watch each other’s activity or chat atop the page.

10 Tips for Evernote Users

Evernote is the perfect tool to capture your ideas, to-dos, web page clippings, scanned images and everything else. It does take time to realize the utility of this powerful software, but once you get the hang of it, you’ll find it difficult to manage your digital life without Evernote.

I have been using Evernote extensively for about 2 years now and store practically everything from notes to web pages to reminders. And since Evernote can integrate will all the popular apps – Dropbox, Google Drive and Google Calendar to name a few – through web services like IFTTT or Zapier, that makes it even more useful.

10 Evernote Tips and Tricks

Here are some of the best features of Evernote that most of us may not be aware of. And if you have been wondering why would anyone need Evernote when Gmail can serve as a similar storehouse, these little things will convince you to make the move.

1. Password-protect Sensitive Text

While it is not possible to encrypt an entire note inside Evernote, you can select text inside individul notes and protect the sensitive bits with your own password. Evernote supports 2-factor authentication so it will be really difficult for someone to get in your account but with encryption, you get an extra layer of protection.

Bonus tip: You can even search for “Notes with encyption” to quickly see all the encrypted notes.

2. Create a Watch Folder

People use Evernote to store scanned receipts, PDF manuals, cooking recipes, travel tickets and other documents that they may need on the go. Instead of manually importing these documents into Evernote, you can create a “watch” folder on your computer and any file that you drop inside this folder will automatically show up in your Evernote. This is a Windows only feature though.

3. Stay Local

The USP of Evernote is instant sync. You make a note on your Android phone and it will show up on your computer and iPad. That said, if you would like to create notes that only stay on your computer and do not sync with your other devices, you can create a Local Notebook. Notes and files place inside this notebook will not be uploaded to Evernote servers and you won’t be able to convert this into a synchnornized notebook anytime later.

4. Create Shortcuts to Notes

If you are open a note, you need to launch the Evernote application, search for the note and then double-click to open it. This is time-consuming but what you can do is use Apple Script on Mac to create shortcuts to notes that you frequently use and place them on the desktop. Here’s a sample script:

tell application id "com.evernote.Evernote"
 
 --- Replace NotebookName with your Evernote Notebook
 set notebookName to "NotebookName"
 
 --- Replace NoteTitle with the title of your note
 set matchingNotes to find notes ("intitle:NoteTitle")
 set matchingNote to item 1 of matchingNotes
 
 open note window with matchingNote
 activate
 
end tell

Save the .scpt file on your desktop and double-click it to quickly open the corresponding note.

5. Search Text inside Images

Like Google Drive, Evernote supports OCR and lets you search for text inside images and even handwritten notes. For instance, you can use the phone camera to snap restaurant menus and forward the photographs to your Evernote. The next time you want to order “Okra Masala”, you can just search in Evernote and it will show all the restaurant menus where that dish is available.

Bonus tip: Put recoType:handwritten or recoType:picture in the search box to see all your notes whose content can be extracted using OCR.

6. Use Nested Tags

You have been using tags to group related notes in Evernote but did you know that the tool also supports nested tags just like labels in Gmail. Open the Tags list in Evernote and drop a tag over another to set the former as a sub-tag of the latter. This makes tag organization easier and you don’t have to create separate notebooks for everything.

Bonus tip: You can add special symbols like hash or the exclamation mark in the beginning of a tag name to put your most-used tags at the top of the list.

7. Advanced Evernote Search

Evernote supports a variety of advanced search operators (full list) to help you find the exact information you are looking for. Some examples:

1. Use source:web.clip <keyword(s)> to search notes saved via the web clipper.
2. Use created:day-2 to see notes created in the last 2 days. Or say created:week for notes added this week.
3. Use source:mobile.* to get a list of notes created using any of Evernote’s mobile app.

8. Bulk-forward Emails to Evernote

Your Evernote account has a dedicated email address and any message forwarded to this address will become a note in your default notebook. If you have a bunch of messages in Gmail that you would like to store in Evernote, use the auto-forward script – just create a label in Gmail called Evernote and any mails with this label are forwarded to Evernote automatically.

9. Turn your Emails into Reminders

Evernote is not just a tool for archiving emails but the same workflow can be used to create quick reminders from your mailbox. Compose a new message, or forward an existing one, and put an exclaimation symbol in the subject line followed by the date when you would like to be reminded and send it to your Evernote address. For instance:

Subject: Learn how to code !2014/12/12
Subject: Pick up flowers !tomorrow

10. Edit Attachments Live

Evernote supports Live Updates and is therefore more convenient than storing file attachments in email (which are read only). Let me explain. If you have attached a PDF file to a note, you can double-click the attachment to edit the PDF and save. The file will be automatically updated in your note as well.

How to Connect an External Microphone to your iOS Device

With apps like Adobe Story, iMovie and ScreenChomp, it has become relatively easier for anyone to produce movies, slideshows, podcasts and other visual content on their iPads and iPhones. That said, the camera has improved considerably over the years but the one area where iOS devices still need to catch up is the audio. The in-built mic isn’t bad but if you would like to produce videos with high-quality audio, you will have to use an external microphone.

How to Use a USB Microphone with iOS

When it comes to choosing an external microphone for your iOS device, you have two options.

You can either use a plug-n-play iOS compatible microphone that directly plugs into your iPad or iPhone with a lightning to USB cable. One end goes into the USB microphone while the other into the lightning connector port. The recently launched Rode NT USB and Apogee MiC 96k are some of the best iOS condenser microphones in the market. They ship will all the necessary lightning and USB cables and require no batteries or external powered USB hubs.

Alternatively, if you already have a good-quality USB microphone that you are using with your computer – like the Samson or the Blue Yeti – the good news is that you can save some money and connect your existing desktop mic to your iPad or iPhone with the help of few cables and accessories – see illustration.

To get started, you would need a powered USB hub (look for the power adapter symbol in the description, also go for USB 3.0) and the lightning to USB adapter(remember, it’s the adapter and not the cable). Now connect the iPhone /iPad to the USB microphone through the USB hub as shown in the illustration above.

1. Plug one end of the Apple Lightning to USB adapter into the Lightning port of your iPhone or iPad and connect the other end to the powered USB hub through the supplied USB Type B cable.
2. Use the power adapter cord to connect the hub to the electrical outlet.
3. Connect the external USB microphone to one of the available ports on the hub using the same USB cable that you were previously using to connect the mic to the desktop computer.

That’s it. You can open any app – Garageband or iMovie for example – and try recording your voice using the external mic. Tap the microphone head and if you notice a spike in the waveform, the connections are working properly.

If you are unable to hear the recorded audio, remove the lightning adapter from the iOS device and replay the audio. Or if your external desktop microphone has a headphone jack, you can use that to live-monitor the sound coming out of your iOS device.

[*] While you can connect an iOS device to a USB microphone directly using a lightning to USB cable, iOS is likely to throw an error saying – “Cannot use device – The connected device requires too much power”.

A Price Tracker Made for Online Shopping in India

The festival season has kicked off in India and it is probably the best time to indulge yourself in online shopping. The biggest online retailers in the country – Flipkart, Snapdeal and Amazon India – are battling it out with big discounts and rock-bottom prices to bring new customers and also to maximize their share of your pocket.

The biggest online sale ever in India has recently concluded at Flipkart and, despite some technical hiccups, they sold over 2 million items in a single day to 1.5 million people. Impressive. Amazon India is launching a mega sale later this week while Snapdeal is already offering huge discounts on many products in their catalog. All in all, this definitely looks like a good time to open your wallet.

The prices of products at various shopping websites fluctuate frequently and wouldn’t it be useful if there were a mechanism that will alert you when the prices of specific products change. Well, Google Sheets can help here.

Using the Price Tracker – Step by Step

I had earlier written a price tracker for Amazon and the new version includes support for the most popular shopping websites in India. You can now use this Google Sheets based Price Tracker to monitor and compare prices of products on Flipkart, Snapdeal, Infibeam and Amazon India.

The Price Tracker will take no more than a minute to setup. Even my 9 year old son was able to get this up and running on his Chromebook without any external help. He is now using it to track prices of some toys and activity books that he wants me to buy for him this Diwali (better than wasting money on crackers).

1. Click here to copy the Price Tracker Google Sheet in your Google Drive.
2. Put the links (URLs) of one or more products from Snapdeal, Flipkart, Amazon.in or Infibeam in column A. You’ll have to put the links of individual product pages and not categories or search pages. You can add or remove items from this list later on as well while the Price Tracker is active.
3. Go to the Cell A11 and put your own email address. This is the address where the price alerts will arrive.
4. Open the India Price Tracker menu in the Google sheet (see screenshot) and choose Authorize. Next go to the same menu and choose Start Tracker to begin tracking.

That’s it. You’ll get daily email alerts when the prices of any of these products change. Internally, this tool is screen scraping prices from Flipkart and Snapdeal while in the case of Amazon, it gets the prices through the Amazon API.

The tracker runs once every 24 hours but you can always change the frequency manually. Go to the Tools menu in the sheet and choose Script Editor. Go to Resources -> Current Triggers and change the frequency of the trackPrices trigger from daily to hourly.

Restart your Android Phone in Safe Mode to Troubleshoot Problems

 Do you know that you can restart your Android phone in safe mode much like your Windows or Mac computers? Press and hold the Power / Sleep button on your phone and you’ll be presented with an option to Power Off the device. Tap and hold that option and you will now be able to reboot your phone in “safe” mode.

When the phone is in safe mode, you’ll see the words Safe Mode in the lower left corner of the screen. Apparently I am very late to the party – the safe mode feature has been available in Android for many years – but it does seem to solve two problems:

1. If your Android phone freezes or crashes on startup, or randomly restarts, you can force restart your phone in Safe mode and uninstall any of the recent app(s) that may be preventing your phone from working correctly. Now when your phone is in safe mode, you would only see the factory-installed apps on the phone but you can still go to Settings -> Apps to uninstall any apps that you have recently downloaded.
2. If your Android phone has become slow over time – because of all the installed apps, themes and widgets – you can use the safe mode to temporarily turn the tortoise into the hare without having to do a factory reset. The phone becomes insanely fast in safe mode and you can still use all the Google apps including Gmail, Chrome, Maps, Calendar and so on. The device feels more responsive too.

To exit the safe mode, restart your device by holding the power button, then power off and restart. The device will open in the normal mode automatically. All your apps and screens are preserved but the one big downside with Safe mode is that will log you out of all the non-Google apps. So if you have Android apps like Dropbox, Twitter or Facebook on your phone, you’ll have to login again in all these apps.

10 URLs That Every Google User Should Know

Where can I get a list of ad that I’ve clicked on Google? What does Google know about the places I’ve visited recently? Where should I go if have forgotten the administrator password for Google? What are my interests as determined by Google?

Here are 10 important links that every Google user should know about. They are tucked away, somewhere deep inside your Google Account dashboard, and they may reveal interesting details about you that are known to Google. Let’s get started.

1. Create a new Google Account using your existing email address. The regular sign-up process uses your @gmail.com address as your Google account username but with this special URL, you can use any other email address as your username.

https://accounts.google.com/SignUpWithoutGmail

2. Google creates a profile of yourself based on the sites you visit, your Google+ account and other signals. They try to guess your age, gender and interests and then use this data to serve you more relevant ads. Use this URL to know how Google sees you on the web.

https://www.google.com/ads/preferences/

3. Google lets you export all your data out of the Google ecosystem. You can download your photos, contacts, Gmail messages and even your YouTube videos. Head over the the Takeout page to grab the download links.

https://www.google.com/takeout

4. If you ever find your content appearing on another website that is using one or more Google products – say Blogger, AdSense, Google+ or YouTube – you can raise a DMCA complaint with Google against that site to get that content removed. This wizard can also be used to remove websites from Google search results that are scraping your content.

https://support.google.com/legal

5. Your Android device may be reporting your recent location data and velocity (are you moving and if yes, how fast are you moving) back to Google servers. Head over to the Google Maps website to see your entire location history and you also have the option to export this data as KML files that can be viewed inside Google Earth or even Google Drive.

https://maps.google.com/locationhistory

6. Google records every search term that you’ve ever typed into their search boxes. They even keep a log of every Google ad that you have clicked on various websites and if you are a Google Now user, you can also see a log of all your audio search queries. OK Google.

https://history.google.com
https://history.google.com/history/audio

7. You need to login to your Gmail account at least once every 9 months else Google may terminate your account according to their program policies. This can be an issue if you have multiple Gmail accounts so as a workaround, you can setup your main Gmail account as the trusted content for your secondary accounts. Thus Google will keep sending you reminders every few months to login to your other accounts. Not available for Google Apps.

https://www.google.com/settings/account/inactive

8. Worried that someone else is using your Google account. Go to the activity report to see a log of every device that has recently been used to log into your Google account. You also get to know the I.P. Address and their approximate geographic location. Unfortunately, you can’t remotely log out of a Google session.

https://security.google.com/settings/security/activity

9. This is a complete list of web apps, browser extensions, Google Scripts and mobile apps that have any read or write access to your Google data. If the permission level says “access to basic account info”, it basically means that you have used your Google account to sign-in to that app.

https://security.google.com/settings/security/permissions

10. This is important URL for Google Apps users. If your Google Account ever getshacked, use this secret link to reset your admin password. You’ll be asked to verify your domain name by creating a CNAME record in your DNS.

https://admin.google.com/domain.com/VerifyAdminAccountPasswordReset [*] Replace domain.com in the above URL with your own web domain name.

How to Work Offline in Google Chrome

When you open any page inside Google Chrome, it connects to the Internet, fetches the latest version of the page from the server and displays it on your screen. If your computer is offline, Chrome will display an error message with a dinosaur* image saying it is unable to connect to the Internet.

Internet Explorer and Firefox offer an offline mode that auto-saves a copy of web pages as you browse the Internet and displays this local copy when you are not connected to the Internet. Thus, if you are offline in a flight, you can still open and read websites that you accessed while your computer was online.

Offline Browsing inside Google Chrome

The recent versions of Google Chrome also support offline browsing though the option to easily access the cached version of any web page is hidden deep inside the settings.

While inside Chrome, type chrome://flags/ to access the experimental features page and search for the “Enable Offline Load Stale Button” option. Click “Enable” against the option and restart your browser.

Now if you are offline, your Chrome browser will give you an option to load the “stale copy” if the page you are trying to access is available in the local cache (see screenshot).

Google Chrome caches the HTML content, images, JavaScript and the CSS stylesheets associated with a page so your offline copy should not look very different from the original. However, if there are resources that require an active Internet connection, like JavaScript widgets or videos, they’ll be replaced with placeholder images.

To test the feature, open any page inside Chrome, turn off your Wi-Fi or disconnect the Ethernet cable, and restart the browser. If the offline mode** is enabled, the cached version would show up on your screen.

Learn more Chrome tips & tricks or download the essential Chrome add-ons.

[*] This is the Tyrannosaurus rex (or T-rex) dinosaur that had tiny little arms and the image probably illustrates that Chrome, like the dinosaur, couldn’t reach the Internet because of its short arms. (source: Quora)

[**] The offline browsing option was added in Chrome v36. If you are still using an older version, you need to open the Chrome flags page and enable the option that says “Enable Offline Mode.” It willl no longer serve the “not connected to the Internet” error if the page you are trying to access is available in the local cache.