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MobileStudio Frequently Asked Questions

What file types does MobileStudio support?

You can store any type of file on your iPhone or iPod Touch using MobileStudio. MobileStudio can open the following file types:

1. *Text Document - Word 97 (.doc), Word 2003 (.xml), Word 2007 (.docx), UTF8 Text (.txt), Pages (.pages.zip)
   

2. *Spreadsheets - Excel 97 (.xls), Excel 2007 (.docx), Numbers (.numbers.zip)
   

3. *Presentations - PowerPoint 97 (.ppt), Keynote (.key.zip)
   

4. *Internet - Portable Document Files (.pdf), HTML Files (.html), Safari Web Archives (.webarchive)
   

5. *Image - Joint Photographic Group (.jpg), Portable Network Graphic (.png), Tagged Image File Format (.tif, .tiff), Bitmap (.bmp)
   

6. *Sound - Mpeg-1 Audio Layer 3 (.mp3), Mpeg-4 Part 14 (.m4a, .m4b, .m4p, .m4r), Wave (.wav), Audio Interchange Format (.aif)
   

7. *Video - Mpeg-4 Part 14 (.mov, .mp4, .mpv, .m4v, .3gp, .3g2)
   

8. *Archives - Zip Files (.zip)
   

I’m using Firefox, Internet Explorer, or Safari to connect to MobileStudio, and it says the folder is read only. How do I send files to MobileStudio?

Internet browsers offer read-only access to files via FTP. Thus, files can only be viewed, not modified or new files transfered. To do this, follow the tutorials for Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Mac OS X. They can be found in MobileStudio by tapping the transfer button in the bottom right-hand corner, then tapping one of the tabs at the bottom of the screen.

Windows users have a built-in FTP client called, confusingly, Explorer. They can access MobileStudio without downloading any additional software. Mac OS X contains only a read-only FTP client in the Finder, and thus must download an FTP client such as Cyberduck to connect to MobileStudio. This is detailed in the tutorial as well.

Why won’t MobileStudio open my txt files? They are all blank!

MobileStudio uses a text encoding format called UTF-8 to load and save txt files. UTF-8 is backwards compatible with standard 7-bit ASCII files, but doesn’t work if non-standard 8-bit ASCII characters are used (such as many characters with accents). Additional support for other text formats is coming in the next release. For now, please ensure that you are saving your txt files in UTF-8 format.

The old MobileStudio could e-mail files. How come I can’t see that option?

Apple saw fit to remove email attachments from iPhone OS 2.0. This is likely due to carrier network bandwidth eaten up by sending large attachments. We hope to restore this feature ASAP, even if it must include a data size limit.

MobileStudio is only in English. How come you guys aren’t internationally aware?

Actually, all of the programmers for Pixio are at least bi-lingual! MobileStudio has good international support under the hood. Localizations are coming in Spanish, Portuguese, German, French, Italian, Russian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin Chinese, and many others. These localizations will likely be included in version 1.2.0.

MobileStudio mangled my Office document or iWork document! Parts are missing!

MobileStudio uses a document viewer provided by Apple to view MS Office and iWork documents. This viewer is not full featured, and some portions of documents will not show up when being viewed on the iPhone or iPod Touch. Don’t worry though, no data has been lost. If you transfer the document back to your computer and open it, the missing portions will still be there. Unfortunately, short of rewriting Apple’s document viewer, we have no control over this problem.

Why does MobileStudio talk about “FTP clients”? I don’t use one of those, do I?

FTP clients are built into familiar programs like Explorer on Windows and Finder on the Mac. Although they don’t look like typical FTP clients, they speak the same language to MobileStudio that dedicated FTP clients like FileZilla, Cyberduck, and WinSCP do.

Why does the transfer screen say “Port Blocked”?

Whenever a connection is made by your computer to your iPhone or iPod Touch, ports on the computer and device are opened. The endpoints of these connections are called ports. One port is held by the computer’s FTP client, and one is held by MobileStudio. MobileStudio listens for connections on port 2121. If MobileStudio closes while the connection to the computer’s FTP client is still active, the communication channel is held open. When you go to use MobileStudio again, it can’t listen on port 2121 because it is already in use. Close your FTP client on your computer before closing MobileStudio to avoid blocked ports.

I use Safari and the port is always blocked for me. How come?

It is important to note that when opening an FTP connection to MobileStudio on Safari, Safari hands the actual job of communicating off to Finder. Because Finder is closely tied to the core of Mac OS X, you can’t close it in the normal fashion. To disconnect cleanly when using Finder as the FTP client, don’t close the FTP window. Instead click on the small eject icon in the “Shared” group on the left side of the window. For example, in the image below, the icon to click is the eject icon to the right of “10.0.0.101”. We recommend using Cyberduck or Firefox on the Mac whenever possible.