I recently got annoyed by the fact that Google Chrome couldn’t open iTunes links in the iTunes app on my Mac, so I decided to look for a solution.

I haven’t been following Chrome’s (numerous) updates in quite a while, so I don’t remember when the app got a redesigned Settings page. In spite of the cleaner look, though, there’s still an option to manage “protocol handlers”, which are the settings that determine how Chrome should work with webpages that request to open other applications installed on a computer, such as Apple’s iTunes Preview website and iTunes. (more…)

In January, I tried to put together a bookmarklet to send the webpage currently open in Google Chrome for iOS to Apple's Safari. That turned out to be a surprisingly complex effort as Google didn't think offering an “Open In Safari” option would be a good idea, and the app's URL scheme produced some interesting results when opening and closing Chrome.

I was reminded of the bookmarklet this morning by reader @CNWLshadow, and I realized that I never posted the solution I settled with. It consists of a browser bookmarklet and a Pythonista script, and it works with just one tap.

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Released earlier today, Google Chrome for iOS has been updated with built-in Messages sharing and a new menu to access previously-visited webpages.

Available from the Share menu in the top toolbar, Messages integration brings up a modal Messages window to send a webpage’s title and URL to someone else. This is a good addition – I’ve long relied on bookmarklets and third-party apps to forward Chrome links to Messages – but unfortunately one I’ll make little use of, as iOS doesn’t let you quickly address a message to a pre-defined group of contacts.¹

I find the new History menu much more interesting for my daily Chrome workflow. Similarly to Safari, you can now tap & hold the Back/Forward buttons to show a list of websites you have navigated to; tapping on one will take you back to that page. Like Apple’s implementation, this is a per-tab history; unlike Safari, the list of pages is shown in a dropdown menu rather than a full-screen modal view (on iPhone).

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Last night, Tweetbot for iOS was updated with support for the Twitter 1.1 API, which, among various requirements, includes the need of linking a tweet’s timestamp – the date and time when it was sent – to its unique URL on twitter.com. In Tweetbot, you can now open the tweet detail view and tap on the timestamp to automatically open the Twitter website in your default browser; in terms of interaction, I like this change because it lets me open tweets in Google Chrome with just one tap.

In thinking about the update last night, I realized that:

• My team and I use iMessage for daily communication;
• The majority of URLs we share are Twitter URLs;
• We all use Tweetbot on iOS and OS X;
• Easier browser access means easier bookmarklet triggering;
• Drafts can access iMessage.

And I concluded that:

• I could chain every piece of the puzzle together;
• Hopefully somebody else will find it useful and adapt the workflow to other similar scenarios.

Therefore, I created a browser bookmarklet, a Python script, and a Drafts action to automate the entire process and demonstrate how you can convert Twitter URLs to tweetbot:// URLs and send text from Pythonista to Drafts.

As usual, I am posting the following workflow as a proof of concept that you can modify and adapt to your needs. For instance, you can change the action that is triggered in Drafts, the x-success parameter that will be triggered, or the way Twitter links are converted to Tweetbot-specific URLs.

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Tweetbot 2.7, released today for the iPhone and iPad, comes with a new Browser setting to specify an external app for opening links. I have been testing the feature and I’m a big fan of this update.

In the Settings, you can now choose to open links directly in Safari, Google Chrome, or 1Password. There are two ways to do this: you can choose to keep opening links in Tweetbot’s own web view and then forward them to your browser of choice; or you can skip Tweetbot’s web view altogether and go directly to a different browser upon tapping a link.

Opening links in Safari and 1Password doesn’t have anything special to it aside from the fact that you’ll be taken out of Tweetbot and into another browser. The 1Password integration is particularly useful as it is, essentially, the same idea behind my bookmarklet, only available inside Tweetbot: if you see a link for a website that you also want to log into, you can use 1Password’s built-in browser to access it.

Using Chrome alongside Tweetbot is my new favorite option, as it leverages Chrome’s support for x-callback-url to enable a completely automated workflow to open Chrome and go back to Tweetbot. If you open a link in Google Chrome, a new tab will open showing a back button labeled “Tweetbot”; once you’re done reading, you can hit that button to automatically close the tab and be taken back to your position in the Tweetbot timeline. Chrome is smart in hiding the back button if you navigate to other pages from the Tweetbot-created tab; the browser also remembers the “special” tab if you switch to other tabs and then go back to the one created by Tweetbot. There’s a minor bug in this version that will redirect to the Tweetbot’s Timeline when you open a link from Mentions, but Tapbots is aware of it. For me, this is a very welcome addition to Tweetbot as it allows my two most-used iOS apps to better communicate with each other without requiring me to manually move between apps. I can get all the benefits of using an external browser (Facebook sharing, using bookmarklets) while still being able to go back to Tweetbot seamlessly.

For Flickr and Vine users, Tweetbot 2.7 also adds inline previews. Vine’s short videos are shown with a standard iOS video player that has a play/pause button.

Tweetbot 2.7 is a minor, yet useful update for Chrome and 1Password users who have been wishing the app could open links in other browsers. You can find the update on the App Store (iPhone, iPad).

A few weeks ago I switched back from Safari to Google Chrome. I wanted to give Safari a fair chance, especially after the introduction of iCloud Tabs, but, alas, the browser never “clicked” for me the way Chrome did. Worse, using Safari on a daily basis for work-related tasks became an unsafe bet, as it was crashing too often, taking several minutes to sync my iCloud Tabs, or generally hanging for no apparent reason. I’m still figuring out the ins and outs of Chrome — particularly how to handle the lack of a “default browser” option on iOS — but, so far, Chrome is working better for me.

One thing I miss from Safari is the ability to launch bookmarks in the Bookmarks Bar with a simple CMD+1…9 keyboard shortcut. I use a lot of bookmarklets (which, by the way, Chrome syncs faster than Safari across devices), and I’m too used to hitting CMD+2 for OmniFocus and CMD+4 for Pinboard to give up the convenience of quick bookmarklet activation. Unfortunately, Chrome uses Safari’s CMD-based shortcuts for switching between open tabs.

The solution was laying in my dock the whole time. As cleverly shown by Patrick Welker, you can use a Keyboard Maestro macro to assign a keyboard shortcut to what is, essentially, Keyboard Maestro’s own GUI scripting, only done with a visual workflow. Make sure to read Patrick’s post to see how you can create a simple macro to “click” a bookmark in Google Chrome.

For the non-Keyboard Maestro users, a solution is to actually use AppleScript GUI scripting to simulate clicking a bookmark’s name. Using something like the script below, you can use any launcher that supports assigning a keyboard shortcut to an AppleScript to quickly launch a Google Chrome bookmark.

tell application "System Events"
	tell process "Google Chrome"
		click menu item "pin" of menu "Bookmarks" of menu bar 1
	end tell
end tell

The script could use an error-checking system to see if Chrome is the frontmost application, but I avoided adding it because I know I won’t use the shortcut anywhere else.

As for Chrome on iOS: because the browser forces you to type out bookmarklet names to launch them, my suggestion is to use a standard prefix so you’ll be able to launch them easily from the iOS keyboard. For instance, I prepend “xx” to my most used bookmarklets, so Chrome for iOS will filter the names right away.