One feature that I use a hell of a lot on my Android phone is the “Share Via” feature, I’m not sure exactly how it works but as I see it applications can register themselves to the OS as being available to share different types of content. When a user wants to share something the sharing application then asks the OS what applications are available to share this content for example:
The first application then seamlessly hands the content over to the second application which can do whatever the hell it wants with it. This is great for sharing to your chosen social network etcetera but it really comes into it’s own when you want to consume content and then blog about it.
One of the first applications I downloaded when I got my iPad was Flipboard, it seamlessly weaves together RSS feeds, Twitter feeds, Tumblr, my Google reader account, Facebook and anything else you throw at it, it’s great for consuming information. But… when I find something I like and want to share I am limited in what I can share to:
The only reason I can even share to that many things is because it’s built into FlipBoard iOS only allows you to share via email or (new in iOS 5) Twitter, either way I have to go through a rather convoluted process to share an item to my blog which I can do fairly simply on my phone.
From Safari all I can do is Tweet or email pages:
Its a shame because I really would like to be able to browse crap on my iPad and post directly to my blog from Safari it seems really natural that this should be easy to do, and sharing data from one application to another should be simple. I guess it would break Apple’s segregation of applications philosophy, but I think if the OS handled passing data from one application to another, like it does in Android, it’s fairly safe.
As it stands I have an email alias set up that I use to store any links that I want to blog, I then forget I’ve sent the email and forget to blog about whatever it is that I wanted to blog about.




