Jumping ahead … avoid browsers
First, let’s jump ahead for a moment to say that while our guide will open and can be viewed on Internet browsers like Chrome, Edge, Safari and others, that’s not what you want to do. Some are better than others, but the interactive features will not function nearly as well as they will on apps designed for the purpose.
We can’t stress that enough.
For Windows computers and all Android devices, the best choice for viewing our guide and for supporting their interactive features is Adobe Acrobat Reader. Nothing else we have tested comes close.
Adobe’s Reader also works well on Macintosh computers, but the Preview app that comes pre-installed on Macs is preferred by many who use our our guide. Just be sure to choose View > Single Page in the app’s menu or it will not display the pages properly.
For iOS devices, such as Apple’s iPad, the best app we have found is Apple Books, an app that some people still call by its former name, iBooks. It comes pre-installed on Apple devices and computers.
First steps
So you’ve visited our shopping cart, made a purchase and received an email with a link to the guide that you ordered from us.
We recommend you first download the guide file to a laptop or desktop computer with which you are familiar. The reason is that if you wish to use the guide on other devices it is less complicated for most people to transfer a big file from a computer to a mobile device than the other way around.
With a Windows or Mac computer, download and save the file to a folder which you won’t delete. That way you will always have it and can copy it to other electronic devices.
However, if you would rather download to your iOS or Android device, the instructions follow…
iPad or iPhone
On your device, tap on the link in the email you received from Salish Sea Pilot. It will take you to a page with a download button.
Tap on the button. The guide will open in your browser. In the upper right of the screen (iPad), or lower centre of the screen (iPhone), you will see the sharing icon (a square with an arrow pointing up). Tap on it, then scroll to the right to find the orange Apple Books icon. Tap on it and your guide will be saved in the Books app and should remain there until you delete it.
Android tablet or smartphone
On Android devices, use Adobe Acrobat Reader. It is free, but will need to be installed on your device before installing our guide.
Once Adobe Reader is installed, tap on the link in the email you received from Salish Sea Pilot. It will take you to a page with a download button.
Tap on the button. The guide will download to your files. To access the file, tap on the Acrobat Reader app. If you have difficulty finding the guide file, search for “Salish Sea Pilot” and the guide should be listed.
In the future, you will be able find your guide by tapping on the Acrobat Reader icon on the home screen of your device.
Copying the guide from PC/Mac to mobile device
Our guide works brilliantly on PCs and Macs, if we do say so ourselves.
But the focus of the design of our e-book guide is for it to be used with a touchscreen, so most users who first download it to a PC or Mac will want to also install it on a mobile device.
And many might try what they have done in the past — send the file as an email attachment to themselves.
The problem is our guide is 157mb. We don’t know an email service that has an attachment limit that large. Some email providers like Gmail will jump in and offer to send the attachment as a link that you can download after the email arrives in your inbox. Unfortunately, not all email services are so helpful.
The solution is to upload the guides to a cloud storage service like Google Drive, iCloud, Sync.com, Dropbox or OneDrive. All have free accounts with much larger capacity than you will need to upload our guide. You can install your cloud service on all your devices, making it crazy easy to pass large documents back and forth.
Whether you tap on a link in an email or a file in the cloud, follow the iOS and Android instructions above for installing the guide on your devices.
Also make sure the file is downloaded to your device, and you are not just accessing a version that is sitting in the cloud. The cloud version won’t work when you sail off-grid. You can test it by turning off your device’s cell and WiFi, and then try to open and use your Salish Sea Pilot.
Any questions about installation and operation? Just give us a shout.
Stay safe,
Jim and Lynne
