A Not So Easy Way To Add Bookmarklets To Safari For iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch

April 22, 2010

Let me tell you something you probably already know.

Bookmark management in Safari for the iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch completely sucks.

Yes, you could manage your bookmarks with whatever version of Safari you happen to be running on your desktop or laptop, and then synchronize the bookmarks to your devices through iTunes. That works great if you’re one of the 2% of crazies that actually use Safari or pay Apple $99 a year for MobileMe. You could also import all of your bookmarks from IE or Firefox or what-have-you into Safari and then synchronize to your devices. Knock yourself out. I’m sure that will be a great use of your time and that you’ll really enjoy regularly maintaining your bookmarks across browsers and devices.

None of this ever really bothered me, though. I don’t use browser bookmarks anyway (does anyone anymore?) There’s browser history and address bar autocomplete, not to mention there are more than enough online tools to keep track of where you’ve been, where you want to go back to, and what you want to remember. All of this eliminates the need to load up your browser with thousands of bookmarks.

What I do use, however, is bookmarklets — those tasty little bits of Javascript that masquerade as bookmarks but add actual functionality and convenience to your everyday World-Wide-Web experience. Unfortunately, getting these bookmarklets into Safari on the iPhone is an extremely painful process. But that didn’t bother me either… until I got my iPad.

Once I got my hands on the pad, I quickly realized I could no longer function without my beloved bookmarklets. I found myself surfing in a way that mimicked my desktop browsing behavior much more closely than when I browsed on the iPhone.  This meant that I now needed to have my bookmarklets for sharing, posting, tagging, saving, look-ups, etc. But the steps for adding a bookmarklet on the iPad was the same as with the iPhone — an awful one.

The process is far too painful to describe in detail, but Marco Arment of Instapaper details the procedure nicely in his step-by-step guide to adding the Instapaper bookmarklet to an iPhone or iPad.

Basically, you first need to add a placeholder bookmark, and then edit that bookmark by renaming it and pasting the bookmarklet’s Javascript into the field reserved for the bookmark’s URL. That doesn’t sound so terrible until you realize it involves somewhere between 10 and 13 taps as well as typing and pasting.

It goes something like this:  

Of course that’s only IF you managed to find a way to copy a bookmarklet’s Javascript to your clipboard.

And that, for me, is the part that goes beyond pain and crosses over into torture territory. Bookmarklets are created by putting Javascript into a URL.  This enables you to drag the snippet to your browser’s bookmark bar like any other link.  Unfortunately this just wont work in Safari for the i-Devices. And if you think you can take a gander at the page’s source in mobile Safari and copy the Javascript from there, you are mistaken. Furthermore, it isn’t standard practice (thankfully) for bookmarklet creators to put the bookmarklet’s Javascript on the page for you to copy and paste into a bookmark. In most cases that would be fugly. And stupid.

So I took a few minutes to copy the Javascript from all my Chrome bookmarklets and made myself a little iPhone/iPad formatted page with all the Javascript in a selectable textarea for each bookmarklet. I opened up the page on my gadgets, and in about 5 minutes had all of my important bookmarklets loaded into Safari on both my iPad and my iPhone.

I know this is far from ideal, and even further from anything resembling a solution, but until some smart person comes up with a way around this, or until Apple adds some better bookmark management or add-on capabilities to mobile Safari this will have to do for now.

I’ll leave this page up for anyone who wants to add some of these bookmarklets to Safari on their own iPads or iPhones. Just visit http://static.chrisbray.com/bookmarklets on your iPad or iPhone and start tapping.  I hope this takes at least some of the pain out of the process.

Here is the list of somewhat popular bookmarklet Javascripts that I have on the page.  Note that bookmarklets that utilize selected page text (Wikipedia lookup, dictionaries, searches, etc.) wont work due to the way that Apple has implemented select/copy/cut/paste on i-Devices, so I haven’t included any of those.

Share on Posterous

Shorten with bit.ly

Add to Google Reader

Bookmark on del.icio.us

Instapaper: Read Later

Share on Facebook

Clip to Evernote

Share on Tumblr

Ping.fm

Translate to English

Digg This

Reddit

Stumble Upon

Site Info

Show Images

Validate HTML

Let me know if you’d like to see other popular bookmarklets added, and I’ll do my best to throw them in there when I have the time.

 

10 mentions Retweet