Plants of the Gila Wilderness-- Smartphone App

Presented in Association with the
Western New Mexico University Department of Natural Sciences

Gilaflora.com on Your Smartphone

Many people have asked if it is possible to download a gilaflora app for their smartphone so that it can be used when out of reach of a cellphone signal in the forest. In the past, the only way to do this was to download all of gilaflora.com (the online version is now at around 20GB size) onto their phone and run the full website offline. Even that has not been possible for the past few years with tight new Android security measures in place.
Recently, Jason Blake (kudos and many thanks!) has come up with a solution at least for Android phones. I don't have an iPhone, so I don't know if this workaround will function or not on an iPhone. Jason has lowered the resolution of the pix so that the whole download is now around 600 MB, still large but not prohibitive for most of us. You will not be able to pinch and spread the pix without pixelating them though.
In addition to size of the files, Jason converted the entire webpage into one large PDF file with each individual page linked. There are several programs that can read PDF files on my phone, but none of them seemed to have a way to navigate back to the index page and simply closed the file annoyingly instead. I downloaded the free Adobe PDF reader from the Android Play Store and that works best, although still not perfectly. When I open the file, it takes 30-60 seconds to load unless it is already in the phone memory. I use the page-by-page option selectable at the top of the screen. That way, when a page overflows the visible portion of my phone, I get the rest of the page by swiping left. You still cannot hit the "back button" without exiting the file. To go back, touch the page tab at the bottom of the screen. It will give you the option to go back to the last page shown. Unfortunately, you can only do that once. If you want to go back to the index (title) page, you will need to type the page number of the index. On my phone's display, it is page 112. So I type 112 into the box you get by selecting the page tab and it takes me back to the index. All the navigation needs are met, but definitely a bit more difficult than using the website online. It is still the very best option for use on your cellphone offline if it is available to you.
If I haven't scared you away yet, here is the file for you to download and try out! Good luck and let me know how it works out for you!


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