Habitually Good

Zinio is a leading online magazine subscription provider. You can subscribe to online versions of your favorite magazines and read them from your laptop. Interestingly, Zinio offers you a free subscription to a select number of magazines if you are an iPhone user. Why I am interested is that this subscription includes one of my favorite magazines called Popular Photography.

Now, if only everyone had an iPhone, this would have been a great tip. However, that is not the case. Even I don’t have an iPhone, however, I don’t need one.

You can fool the Zinio site into thinking that you are browsing it from an iPhone, and here’s how you can do this simple feat (although I am pretty sure that Zinio will find a way around it soon enough, but till then you can enjoy).

You can do this through either FireFox or Safari as a browser. However, FireFox requires a plugin to do this and since I am using FireFox 3 RC1, this plugin doesn’t work for me, so I am going to show you how to do this for Safari. Run Safari (if you don’t have it installed, get it from the source and install it) and follow the following steps:

Go to Preferences and turn on Develop menu: After running Safari, go to Edit Menu and then open Preferences. Under the Advanced Tab, check the “Show Develop menu in menu bar” option. This displays the Develop Menu. Close the Preferences.

Go to Develop Menu and Emulate iPhone User Agent – Simply go to Develop menu and then find the iPhone option under the “User Agent” submenu and select it.

Enjoy – That’s it. Now browse to the iPhone Zinio page. And enjoy one of 20 magazines available.

Thanks to Scott for this tip.

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