Safari's Share Button

I use Kippt to store my important bookmarks. While the service is fantastic, I haven’t seen a single iOS app that offers to use it.

As I use Reeder and Hacker News on my iPad to keep up with news, I often find interesting things I want to bookmark. But as of today there is no way to directly bookmark links from these apps to Kippt. The situation’s the same with other services not included in foresaid apps.

How could the situation improve? I present to you Safari’s Share Button.1

Right now, on iOS, Safari’s action button has six options:

As the name implies, it’s only present in Safari. Apps that use UIWebView have to implement their own if they want a similar feature, like Reeder did.

What if Apple added a public API to its toolbar to add a universal Share button? That would mean that any app that uses UIWebView (that is, Safari) would have access to the same, universal actions to share content.

What about customization then? It’s hard to imagine Apple adding such feature and expects its users to be savvy enough to add custom URLs like http://bookmark.com/add/?u=%s&t=%s… Thing is, we already use this kind of links: bookmarklets.2 We could imagine Apple adding a section à-la Reading List into Safari for Mac OS X where we would add bookmarklets. They would be synced through iCloud, and usable in this universal Share button.

This way, I could move my Save to Kippt bookmarklet from the bookmarks menu to the Share button and have it accessible in all the apps that I use and that miss it.

  1. I thank Olivier Charavel for his tweet that sparked my imagination. A night later and I had the idea. ↩

  2. I’d bet my left hand that you have almost two of them in your bookmarks bar or menu. ↩