Quarter Life Crisis

The world according to Sven-S. Porst

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Bookmark Advertiser

303 words on ,

One of my motivations for getting involved in Flame was the fact that Apple decided to make transferring a web page which you are viewing in Safari on your Mac to Safari on the iPod very difficult. I find I want to do just that from time to time when I discovered some interesting web page and want to show it to somebody else in the kitchen or so. All ways to achieve this goal require me to do clumsy things like e-mailing the page’s address to myself or using the iPod’s clumsy keyboard.

My idea would be that Safari lets you ‘share’ the pages you are currently viewing and those bookmarks then appear in the iPod’s Safari via Bonjour. But things don’t work this way. As Safari on the Mac lacks such a sharing feature, the URLs of the currently open pages have to be advertised by an additional application. As Safari on the iPod lacks Bonjour support, you can’t possibly see any advertised services in the application itself anyway (and implementing the bookmark sharing in such a way would require a bit of cleverness and background work because the standard advertising of web servers via Bonjour only works for services with addresses on your own machine).

So the hackish workaround is the following: You launch the Bookmark Advertiser application, it grabs the addresses of the web pages you are currently viewing in Safari and advertises them via Bonjour as a service of type ‘urlbookmark’. Flame then just happens to recognise that service type and display it as an openable service which will display the web page in Safari on the iPod.

Bookmark Advertiser Window

This is very lightweight, only supports Safari, doesn’t automatically refresh and fails for URLs which are too long. Yet it does the trick for the applications I had in mind.

October 31, 2009, 20:12

Tagged as bonjour, bookmark, bookmark advertiser, earthlingsoft, flame, mac, safari, service, software.

Comments

Comment by Carl: User icon

I use Instapaper for this. It only works for one person, but it’s decent enough for making a note of pages to look at next time I’m using a real computer.

October 31, 2009, 21:50

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