Regular readers know I’m a big fan of bookmarklets.\u00a0 I use dozens of them in my desktop and mobile browsers to do things like post links to Delicious <\/em>and Twitter<\/em>, subscribe to feeds in Bloglines<\/em>, expand text-areas and fix unreadable color combinations on websites. I’ve\u00a0written about using bookmarklets in mobile browsers<\/a> here on WapReview and I maintain a small archive of Opera Mini compatible bookmarklets at o.yeswap.com<\/a>. So naturally when Google generously gave me an HTC Evo Android phone at Google I\/O, I wanted to use some of my favorite bookmarklets in Android.<\/p>\n
There’s one annoying problem with page sharing as it’s implemented in the browser, is that with most apps it\u00a0 only shares the URL. When I’m sharing a link in a Tweet or a text I like to have the message pre-populated with the page title which I use as the basis for descriptive text to include along with the URL.\u00a0 There’s a fix for that in the form of a free app called Share More<\/strong><\/em> (Android Market Link<\/a>)\u00a0 The app has no GUI, it just adds a Share with Title<\/strong><\/em> option (image above, left) to the browser’s share Menu. When clicked it retrieves the page title and then takes you back to the Share menu where you can send the URL plus the title\u00a0 to any browser’s other sharing destinations.<\/p>\n
A must have free app for bookmarklet users is\u00a0 Bookmarklet<\/strong><\/em> <\/a>(Android Market Link<\/a>) which lets you add your choice of over 50 predefined pseudo bookmarklets to the browser (image above, right) including Google Translate, Alexa, Digg, Slashdot, Delicious, AIM, Evernote, Friend Feed, Google Buzz, My Space and Read It Latter.\u00a0 You can even add your own bookmarklets using the app.\u00a0 The GUI for adding bookmarklets doesn’t accept JavaScript though and only seems to work with services that expect the URL and optionally the page title to be passed as GET parameters using the\u00a0 “?param=”, &parm=” syntax. I couldn’t get it to work with services that expect slash or semi-colon separated arguments like Bloglines\u00a0 or Dataopedia.com.<\/p>\n
For Delicious there’s a great free app named Beelicious<\/a> <\/strong><\/em>(Android Market Link<\/a>) that adds itself to the Share Menu and lets you share page URLs and\u00a0 Titles with the social bookmarking service.\u00a0 Beelicious even maintains a local copy of all the Delicious Tags that you have used and suggests tags as you type (image below, left).<\/p>\n
With Rerware’s MyBookmarks<\/a><\/strong><\/em> (Android Market Link<\/a>) you can actually use real JavaScript bookmarklets in the Android browser. It’s a free Android app that can import all or some of your Firefox, IE or Chrome bookmarks and bookmarklets into the Android browser.\u00a0 To use it you export your desktop browser’s bookmarks to a file. Then run My Bookmarks, which shows you your phone’s device ID (MEID or IMEI). Go to the web form at rerware.com\/MyBookmarks\/<\/a> to enter your device ID and upload your exported bookmarklets file. Back in MyBookmarks on your phone, choose “Import your bookmarks from Rerware.com<\/em>” (image above, right). You have the choice of importing all of them or picking and choosing which ones you want to import.\u00a0 Importing one by one is a bit tedious if you have a lot of bookmarks as you have to respond to a “Add Bookmark? Yes\/No” prompt\u00a0 for every single one (image below, left).\u00a0 If you know your way around HTML is easier to edit the export file to remove unwanted bookmarks before uploading it.<\/p>\n
Regular readers know I’m a big fan of bookmarklets.\u00a0 I use dozens of them in my desktop and mobile browsers to do things like post links to Delicious and Twitter, subscribe to feeds in Bloglines, expand text-areas and fix unreadable color combinations on websites. I’ve\u00a0written about using bookmarklets in mobile browsers here on WapReview and I maintain a small archive of Opera Mini compatible bookmarklets at o.yeswap.com. So naturally when Google generously gave me an HTC Evo Android phone at … Continue reading