Ever since I got my iPhone I have been looking for an easy to use document viewer for viewing Word Documents and PDFs without the need to send them to my email address and download them each time.

There has been a few attempts at this with many applications from Installer but none until now have meet the standard of the native iPhone document viewer that handles you email attachments. Similarily many of appliactions on Installer require a server to be run which is not ideal.

Then came along Docs! Docs is a application that uses the actual built in document viewer on the iPhone within Safari with no server required, just like you would open one in a email, but in this case you can store your documents in a location on your iPhone. I have to say this application is the best I have used for viewing PDFs and Word Documents.

To use it you will need to install Finder first then install Docs. Then simply copy your documents to your iPhone with SSH to a folder of your choice. I recommend creating a Folder called ‘Docs’ in /var/mobile/Media/ and place all your documents in there. To view documents you then open Docs and locate your doucment and open it, where it will open in the native iPhone document viewer within Safari.

A neat trick I found with this application is you can add documents to your iPhones home screen as webclips! The way Docs is implemented is that when you click on a document from the Docs application your document is opened in Safari as something like this - File:///var/mobile/Media/Docs/myDocument.doc. This also means you can have multiple documents open at a time and flick through them in the tabs in Safari like you do with web pages. Once its loaded you can simply press the ‘+’ then ‘Add to Home Screen’ where you can add the Document to your home Screen with your desired name. You will see the loading bar appear and although it seems it is downloading, in fact it is just loading it from memory, so you dont need to worry about Edge or GPRS costs here. Now you will be able to access your documents straight from your homescreen even without a connection or access to your email. Have Fun!

Heres some screen shots of Docs and Web Clips in action: