Imagine the scene.
You are sat at your computer, reading a fascinating article online.
You’re about halfway through reading it when something comes up and you need to leave your desk.
Wouldn’t it be great if you could finish reading the page on your mobile? (Without needing to remember how you found the webpage, or what the URL is?)
With this Firefox extension, you can. 🙂
I’ve mentioned a few times before that I use a personal wiki-based notetaking app to keep myself organised.
In GTD-speak, I use it to store project information, track my actions, store reference info, and lots more. Everything I’m working on will have a set of wiki pages where I’ve written up what I’ve done so far, linked in to my other work and where it fits in with my goals.
So it’s useful to have it with me even when I’m not at my desk. I’ve got the wiki app installed on my ThinkPad and three of my mobiles (HTC Advantage, HTC Universal, and the Treo Pro).
The problem is keeping them all in sync.
The old way
The wiki stores the pages as normal text files. So I have a copy of all of these text files on each device.
Using a freeware app called MobSync, I can sync a directory of files on my desktop with a directory on the mobile.
If I want to use the Treo Pro, I need to make sure I get an up-to-date copy of the files on there first by booting up my PC, connecting them by USB cable, and running the sync app.
Completing the loop for my browser sync hack for Over The Air – this time, syncing back the browser history from your mobile browser when you get back to your desktop computer.
When you connect your mobile to your computer, the URL history of Pocket Internet Explorer is queried and the most recent item is opened on the desktop using your default web browser.
This was a little tricky to implement and needed me to cobble a few bits and pieces together:
RAPIManager to trap and handle device connection eventsFindFirstUrlCacheEntry / FindNextUrlCacheEntry API. The URL retrieved is written to a file on the mobile.
It’s a little icky… but it seems to work!