Where I work.
Finally got my desk cleaned off. What you can’t see in this photo is the enormous pile of papers and garbage behind me.
Wife says "no," Apple says "yes" to iPad 2
Please let this be true.
Great tip: send a webpage from your iPhone to your Mac
Here’s the scenario: you’re on your iPhone, catching up on Twitter. You read a tweet that contains a link and you open it.
A few moments later, you realize you don’t want to read it on your phone. Maybe you don’t have the time right now. Perhaps it’s a webpage loaded with photos and your iPhone is making choking noises. Or it’s a multi-page article. Or it has Flash. Or something. You decide it’s best to read it later on your Mac where you’ve got the bigger screen, the faster processor, the proximity to your morning coffee. Whatever.
So, what do you do?
I run into this all the time. And until today, my solution was to email the link to myself. It worked, but it wasn’t pretty.
Sometimes I’d send a pile of links at a time, clog up my inbox, and sit there clicking each link individually, one at a time. Sure, this qualifies unquestionably as a First World Problem, but it just felt so…so unnecessary. It’s 2011, and I was barely doing better than faxing myself a printout of the website.
Recently, MacStories posted a story describing how to send a link to your Mac using a combination of DropBox, Automator Folder Actions and a free service called SendToDropBox. You send the link in email from your iPhone to your special SendToDropBox account which kicks off a simple workflow that opens the webpage on your Mac just a few seconds later. Email is already the way I’m solving this problem, so other than a new address in the To: field, I don’t have to change how I work at all. Brilliant.
It takes a bit of work to set up, but it’s very straightforward. You can find the details on MacStories here
Addendum: What About Other Methods?
Some services exist that might appear to offer a solution. Instapaper is probably the most obvious. But I am very particular about keeping articles in Instapaper limited to things I actually intend to read. And more often than not, I haven’t decided what to do about that link I want to send my Mac. It might be a fantastic article, truly Instapaper-worthy. Or it might be a cat video. And I only keep the finest cat videos in Instapaper.
Another possibility would be to simply save the page as a Bookmark. My bookmarks get synced through MobileMe, so one would think that might be a good method. But it’s not. First, the workflow is broken. Many of the links I am opening on my iPhone are inside the Facebook or Twitter apps, not Mobile Safari itself. None of those apps offer any sort of UI for saving a bookmark. In order to create one, I’d need to tap to open it in the browser, wait for the page to reload, tap to save the bookmark, edit the name, et cetera. Meh. Too much hassle. I won’t do it. I know it.
Besides, I’ve already stated that almost all of these links fit into the category of “things I want to check out,” not “things I want to save.” And, while I know Safari can’t tell the difference, I have a tendency to be very lax about cleaning up my Bookmarks. Anything that goes in there pretty much becomes a permanent addition. Exhibit A: I believe I still have a Bookmark to my AOL account somewhere in there. So, yeah.
