Xantus' HTML5 Blog

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Adlib, The Secret iPad Library?

I don’t know if you have seen the iPad User Guide on your iPad (In your Safari bookmarks).  It looks an acts like a native app, but it’s built using html, css and JavaScript.  Jim Hoskins has dug into it more.  Apple’s library doesn’t have a name, but it’s being called ‘Adlib’.

The iPad User Guide is located here: http://help.apple.com/ipad/mobile/interface/.  You can’t normally get at it without changing your UserAgent though.  Most browsers have a UserAgent switcher, but you’ll need to use a webkit based browser like Safari or Chrome.

The iPad UserAgent 

Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; U; CPU OS 3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.4 Mobile/7B334b Safari/531.21.10

Investigation

I’m a linux user (ubuntu), so I use Chromium for most of my development and testing instead of Safari.  I prefer using the dev branch of Chromium, since I can run it alongside my other browsers.  (See the next section)


Jim has posted two github gists of the Adlib code: Adlib.js and iPadIntro.js

Note: none of this code has been licensed by Apple.

I leave the rest up to you, since I’m also just now digging around into Adlib myself

Using Chrome

You can use the —user-agent param to supply the iPad UserAgent to chrome.

Download Chromium:

Windows

Mac

Linux


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