iCab Mobile (Web Browser)

Use the "modules" (5th button of 7 at bottom of screen) with the "Convert to ePub" option to turn a web page into an ePub; then open the file in your "downloads" (6th button of 7) into iBooks. I was looking for an easy way for a friend who has an iPhone 4 and PC to convert the content of web page passages she liked to read into iBooks, preferably as ePub files for easy offline reading. iCab Mobile has a number of nice features and is actively maintained, with several updates since the release of iOS 6, and several mentions of actions taken to improve VoiceOver accessibility in past version releases. What brought me to iCab Mobile was its inclusion of "Convert to ePub", which can be installed as a browser plugin or as a java bookmarklet on a number of browsers. Using this is super easy: 1. Once on the web site you want to convert you double tap on the "modules" button. 2. On the "Module" page you can just slide finger up from the home button and double tap on "Convert to ePub", which is the next to last entry on the screen, then double tap the "Done" button at the top right corner of the screen to to return to the web page. 3. Double tap the "Downloads" button (6th of 7 on the bottom of the screen) 4. Flick right to the title of the eBook you want and double tap to bring up you options: "Send by Mail", "Open in external App", "Copy Address", or "Cancel" 5. Double tap "Open in External App" 6. Double tap "Open in iBooks" or choose another eReader or File app (for example, I have Kobo if I want to read without the pause at the end of each page in iBooks), or double tap "Cancel". This is also an easy way to send the converted file to Dropbox, since that will show up as one of the options if you have the Dropbox app installed. 7. You also have the options of organizing your downloads into folders. reordering them, renaming them, deleting them or zip compressing/uncompressing them, with a combination of the "Add" button at the bottom right to create folders and the "Edit" button in the top right to perform editing functions. Double tapping "Edit" brings up two extra controls on either side of each download item: a button announced as either "active" or "inactive" at the left edge of the screen, and "reorder" button that is announced as "draggable" at the right edge of the screen. Items can be reordered by doing a double tap and hold and dragging up or down. (Note that the entire title, date, web site url, and file size of the item gets announced before you hear that this is a button that is "draggable, double tap and hold, wait for the sound, then drag to rearrange" -- don't bother waiting for the whole announcement to recognize this button is a draggable element like bookmarks.) The left side button ("inactive" or "active" depending on whether you have double tapped to select), flags the files you want to delete, zip or unzip, or move into a folder. These buttons appear at the bottom of the screen and get activated when items are selected as "active". Double tap the "Done" button at the top right of the screen when you're finished editing, and double tap the "Close" button in the top left of the screen to leave the "Downloads" screen. You can also use the "Web to PDF" module to create PDFs instead of ePubs, but I find that process less useful. First, ePub versions of eBooks are nicer to use and navigate in iBooks. (It's also not as easy to find an easy ePub creation method, especially outside of a computer). Secondly, while the ePubs are created with titles from the web page, all the PDFs are created with the name "www.web2pdfconvert.pdf" on the Downloads page, and you have to rename them either on the Downloads page or once you export the document into iBooks. Principle is the same: from the web page double tap "modules" and then double tap "Web to PDF". (This is at the end of a long list, so either use a number of three finger flicks up to scroll or a four-finger tap on the bottom half of the screen to get to the last element in the alphabetic list, and the flick left 3 times.) Double tap the "Done" button, the locate the converted file under "Downloads" by double tapping the "Downloads" button. Same procedure of double tapping your selection lets you open this in iBooks. So far I like iCab Mobile a lot. It shares some of he features I like of Atomic Web Browser, like letting you use a different web browser agent to view the Desktop rather than Mobile web pages. One slightly weird point I noticed is that while this international web browser app is localized in English for the U.S. app store, the controls for "Search" and "Reload" are spelled in German. "Suche" instead of "Search" sounds close, but "Reload" is "Seite Neu Laden" mangled by an English pronunciation.