Overview of iPastelet Maker
The prolific coder/blogger Erica Sadun posted a Javascript bookmarklet for iPhone that pastes text into an HTML field on Mobile Safari on the iPhone. Handy, but her example code paste a hard-coded text string. Nonetheless, the bookmarklet is handy to paste text that you commonly use into web forms— text like an email address, user ID, IP address, hostname, etc.
It was a bit of a pain to carefully change the text literal, especially if you have characters that should be url-encoded in your text string. After handcoding a few bookmarks I needed, I whipped up this HTML form. It does the text munging with your custom string, and generates a custom named bookmark that you can easily add to your browser and then sync to iPhone.
UPDATE July 23, 2008: You can now create an iPastelet directly on the iPhone or iPod Touch. Use Mobile Safari to visit this page– Save an iPastelet.
How to Use iPastelet Maker
- Complete the Text to paste: field and the Link/Bookmark name: field.
- Press the Make iPastelet button.
- Right-click the new iPastelet Link: text and Add Link to Bookmarks… (Safari)
or Add to Favorites… (Internet Explorer)
Repeat the steps 1-3 above until you've added a bookmark for each text snippet you'd like to use. - Sync your iPhone using iTunes, making sure iTunes is set to Sync Bookmarks.
iPastelet Maker
iPastelet Link:
Note: Just bookmark the link above. If you actually click the link to follow it, it will just fill-in the field (or cause Firefox to fill-in the field and go to a new page).
Credits and Thanks
Thanks to Apple for the MacBook Pro and the iPhone I love to use. Thanks to TUAW for keeping me up on all the latest Apple news. Thanks to Erica Sadun for the original bookmarklet code and inspiration. Thanks to Jeff Burton for the years of friendship, years of patience, and occasional JavaScript support.
Special Thanks to Craig Hockenberry (IconFactory / Twitterific, Twitterific for iPhone), Joe Maller (Transmogrify), Joe Hewitt and the iUI team (http://code.google.com/p/iui/), and Ankur Kothari (Make the most of the iPhone SDK) for inspiration and examples.