iOS Quality of Life Improvement

I don’t know how difficult it would be to set-up, but I use the “Add to Homescreen” to open Kinopio. I would love if it worked similar to Futureland or Roam where it doesn’t open up a tab in Safari, but it’s own standalone full screen browser type app (sorry if I’m explaining poorly, not sure what it’s called.)

Would be a huge help in staying organized and not having tons of tabs… and reopening the same tab.

The other thing that I don’t know how to solve, I have a regular bookmark for Kinopio.com/journal to open that days journal, but I’m not sure how to get that to the “Add to Homescreen” bookmark… I created a Shortcut for the time-being, which works, but if you are ever able to get to the above then I’d be stuck again…

2 Likes

Would love this too!

The one thing I figured out is you can go to the page settings in Safari and hide the toolbar, and that is a tad bit better.

This book app that I use does the same add to home screen flow, but it doesn’t open Safari tab, instead it’s like it’s own little app, think like a “wrapper” of sorts maybe.

2 Likes

I know what you mean,

I’d love to do this but kept hitting a snag. I tried every guide I could find to make adding the url to homescreen not act like a separate app, but it didn’t work. And there’s no error logging or anything. (If I recall it’s something special in the page <meta>

my current head meta incase anyone has any tips on this

    <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width,initial-scale=1.0">
    <meta name="apple-mobile-web-app-title" content="Kinopio">
    <meta name="apple-mobile-web-app-capable" content="yes">
    <meta name="mobile-web-app-capable" content="yes">
    <meta name="apple-mobile-web-app-status-bar-style" content="default">

only official docs on this i could find: https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/AppleApplications/Reference/SafariHTMLRef/Articles/MetaTags.html

1 Like

Everything I’m saying might be dumb (I don’t know anything about software or development), but I was able to get it to work on an old blog and tried it on my current one (for whatever that’s worth…)

Could it be you have too much…?

One thing I remember is the status bar style code messed things up for me so I ditched it.

My path would be to try removing the viewport, title, and/or status bar lines…

Here’s the post from my old blog, nothing here that I think will really be helpful, but the first two lines of code (icon and web-app-capable) are all I added to my new blog to get it to work.

2 Likes

oh sick I got it working, thanks! (It was failing because of a manifest file declaration in a later part of the meta)

still have some navigator.standalone related cleanups to do before I can ship though. Probably have an update for this soon

3 Likes

Ah this is wonderful news! Thank you!

This probably isn’t something you have control over, but I’m curious if you know of a way to force the URL to be Kinopio.com/journal so it can open up that days journal?

Obviously the URL changes as soon as you load that page, and the Add to Bookmark pop-up doesn’t allow overriding the URL…

1 Like

ya that’s super annoying, I can add a workaround so that if you go to ‘about → apps → mobile → there’ll be a checkbox to ‘start app with journal’’ or something like that which’ll temporarily set the url to /journal so you can add it to homescreen/bookmarks then

1 Like

Okay I’ve shipped the standalone app update. To try it out you’ll need to first remove the old kinopio app from your homescreen and re-add it.

In About → Apps → Mobile, there’s also a toggle for using the /journal url

1 Like

Amazing and looks great. I might be doing something wrong, but I think the /journal toggle is passing just kinopio.club rather than kinopio.club/journal. It does a good job of remembering where you left off though, even after force quitting, which is neat.

1 Like

I’ll give it a try tomorrow to see how it behaves, but I’m thinking this way might actually be better. If it’s always able to remember where you left so you’re just opening the last space rather than forcing it to open at the days journal every time you click the icon… Not sure how it would behave with /journal in terms of remembering the previous state…

When you checked the button and selected add to homescreen, did you see /journal in the url?

But ya tell me how it goes with the regular url version , which loads last space. I might remove that /journal option to reduce complexity

Wow, super cool, thank you!

Just “re-installed” on iPhone and iPad, nice.

So I think that checkbox is still needed.

With it checked, it passes: kinopio.club

Without it checked, it passes: kinopio.club/whatever-page-I’m-on

It’ll be interesting to see how it behaves after being in the background for a long period of time, but force quitting and reopening with it checked brings you back to the last space, but doing that without it checked brings you back to the original URL.

This is on iOS safari?

Sounds like a bug, it should be:

  • With checked: kinopio.club/journal
  • without it checked: kinopio.club
  • when the Apps dialog is closed: kinopio.club/whatever-page-I’m-on

will look into this soon

No, I think you are right. Sorry, I’m still tinkering and figuring out behavior.

I didn’t realize that the little pop-up box with the option needed to stay open while you did the Add to Homescreen.

1 Like

ah okay phew one less thing to fix :slight_smile:

1 Like

I have had the option unchecked, and so far it has behaved as advertised :slight_smile:

1 Like

tweeted about it :slight_smile:

2 Likes

FYI https://github.com/GoogleChromeLabs/pwacompat is a lifesaver for this, drop it in and it adds iOS support with no other meta tags and makes splashscreens and stuff.

1 Like