We’re running a new series here at TiPb (Titanium Powerbook? No, The iPhone Blog!) that brings older but still relevant/interesting/noteworthy articles, reviews, and blog posts back into the forefront of the discussion. Hopefully, we’ll be able to uncover some great articles that you might have missed and offer further insight on everyone’s favorite toy.
Also, it’ll help transition our still new merger, PhoneDifferent fans will get a taste of TiPb writing and TiPb readers will catch up with what has happened in the PhoneDifferent world! Think of it as a blog within a blog or for the metaphorically inclined, dinnertime stories at a big happy family reunion..
Today, we’ll bring back the topic of Bookmarklets. Mike Overbo, our Editor Emeritus, found that Bookmarklets extend the reach and capabilities of the iPhone’s Safari browser. Essentially, Bookmarklets are small computer applications stored as a URL on your bookmarks bar. Examples would include a Find feature, IMDB search, eBay search, etc.
To use these Bookmarklets, simply store them to your iPhone’s bookmarks and when you are in need of, say a quick Wikipedia search, open that particular Bookmarklet and it’ll prompt you with a direct search screen rather than waiting for the page to open up. I use Bookmarklets everyday to quicken my online searching (darn that EDGE), take a look and see if there is anything you can use!
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figure 1: the most important feature is highlighted
There’s another password manager on the scene, and this one looks to be the most secure version that I’ve seen. 1Password is a mac-only application, so there unfortunately isn’t a password manager I could securely recommend to Windows iPhone users yet. The application has a little button that sends an encrypted bookmarklet to Safari that you can then sync to your iPhone. You can open the bookmarklet and view your passwords with a master password that you assign within 1Password.
The bit that gives 1Password the nod above others at the moment is that the bookmarklet is encrypted with good cryptography. The blowfish cipher is a well-respected cipher by Bruce Schneier, one of the most respected cryptologists out there, and 1Password uses blowfish’s maximum key length of 448 bits within the bookmarklet. So, if you’re looking to store your passwords with heavy-duty security, 1Password might be worth your look.
There’s now a challenger to Splashdata’s popular SplashID application for the iPhone. The developer, Selznick Software, has put their PasswordWallet PalmOS application into bookmarklet form on the iPhone. What does that mean? Well, for one, it means no 448-bit blowfish encryption to keep your passwords safe. But it does mean that you have something as a replacement for SplashID on the iPhone. That’s important for any PalmOS Treo folks that are holding out for the applications they need. The software for the Mac is $20, the iPhone bookmarklet upgrade is another $10.
So, yeah. Favelets and bookmarklets. In the podcast, I promised a review article about useful bookmarklets and favelets, for the iPhone. And here it is.
I’ve written a few simple bookmarklets as well; it seems a lot of the bookmarklets are designed for web editors, and not always so much for the average web user. I’m guessing that not many regular folks need to edit CSS from the iPhone, and those that do already have those bookmarklets synched over. But still, there’s a void for popular sites. It seemed that all I found were eBay, Amazon, and Google sites. So I set out to make a few of my own, and edit a few others so that they’d work on iPhone Safari (henceforth, iSafari).
If you have any requests for a custom bookmarklet, put them in the comments. It has to be said that I make no guarantees that I can make the resulting request as I’m not an expert with javascript by any means, but the worst that can happen is that I say no. Okay, that’s not the worst that can happen. The worst is that I say no VERY IMPOLITELY.
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I will try it out "
