I bought an iPad Friday night. I browsed all night exploring Flipboard and reading the digital magazines I subscribed to with Zinio. I loved it! By Sunday night, I was ready to bring back my iPad to the Apple store due to the lack of support for decent bookmarking and sharing tools.

As a curator, I depend a lot on bookmarklets to do my job. A bookmarklet is a one-click functionality that you typically drag to the toolbar of your browser. Good examples are “Shorten with bit.ly”, or “Bookmark on Delicious”. Sadly, you cannot add bookmarklets to the Safari browser running on your iPhone or iPad.

Like I said, I depend on bookmarklets to easily share must-read articles. I used a custom URL shortener (via Bitly.Pro) to share links. And I bookmark ideas and research materials for future articles on Delicious. These simple tasks done on a computer suddenly become cumbersome to do on an iPad. Therefore, I was ready to give up when my geek husband found me a solution. It is not perfect but it greatly reduces the burden of these tasks on the iPad.

The trick is to create a bookmark and then, to paste the proper Javascript as the URL. I wish to send a HUGE thank to Chris Bray for compiling the different Javascript and sharing his neat trick. So far, Chris shared how to run 16 bookmarkets on your iPad. But frankly, I cannot understand why Apple brings us back to the dark ages by not supporting bookmarklets on the iPad.

+ Adding bookmarklets on iPad by Chris Bray

3 Comments

• Line Atallah says:
  Monday, 26 July, 2010 at 18:28
  

  They are so many tasks I wished the iPad would do and doesn’t. I get frustrated at some points! However, I am in love with it. I think that few tasks that it allows me to do, it delivers perfectly. I enjoy the object in my hands, its weight, its aesthetics, and the way it delivers content.
  Mostly, I love reading on it.
• Joshua T Craig says:
  Monday, 6 February, 2012 at 5:40
  

  Hi there,

  I enjoyed you article, and you are right that it is a pain to add bookmarklets. Or at least it used to be a pain.

  Here is the link for the Mercury Browser available for iPhone / iPad. It has native support for bookmarklets. Might be worth checking it out on your iPad.

  http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/mercury-web-browser-the-most/id331012646?mt=8

  The average user doesn’t want to past in javascript and create their own bookmark for a bookmarklet. So I figured I’d suggest this browser.

  Hope it helps
• Lorenzo Caum says:
  Thursday, 14 March, 2013 at 16:00
  

  Here are a couple other ways to install bookmarklets:

  1) You can email the bookmarklet code to yourself. Then open the email and copy the code

  2) You can utilize iCloud to transfer from a Mac. Begin by enabling iCloud on all devices. Then add any bookmarklets to your Safari bookmarks bar. A couple seconds later, you should see your new bookmarks on your iPod touch, iPhone or iPad.