Where’s the peanut butter?!

I spend what feels like way too much time thinking about ways to do things with my phone that save me clicks in the mobile browser or let me do things that aren’t normally possible or easy. But if you’re reading this, odds are you know me personally and are already aware of this. The new bit of excitement comes from a small addition to my mobile homepage - but first I should describe that…

I wrote the homepage on my phone with the intention to easily get to the bookmarks that are most likely to be useful when I’m on the go. One of the items that I use most frequently is a small form with some input and a paired dropdown that lets me use a number of mobile sites. I might type in something to search for and pick the ‘google’ or ‘live’ dropdown item and this is set to post to the mobile search interface for those sites. Or I might type in ‘platypus’ and choose the ‘dict’ or ‘wikipedia’ dropdown option to get the dictionary definition or (mobile) wikipedia entry for our egg-laying, billed cousin. The point is I don’t want to have a million bookmarks for the sites I go to to perform some other search, I want to just do the search. Also, I don’t want to have to know how to get to every mobile version of every site all the time. I want to go there once and always be able to get back instantly.

So the latest addition is adding the mobile delicious link posting URL to that list of sites. It’s awesomely easy and it just works. If you want to build something like this for your own phone, the javascript goes a little like this…

var forms = new Array();
forms.push(new Array(’gmob’, “http://www.google.com/xhtml?hl=en&mrestrict=xhtml&lr=&q=”));
forms.push(new Array(’mbo-wroute’, “http://www.mybus.org/metrokc/wml/help/byroute.jsp?route=”));
forms.push(new Array(’mbo-hroute’, “http://mybus.org/metrokc/route.jsp?route=”));
forms.push(new Array(’bus’, “http://transit.metrokc.gov/cftemplates/show_schedule.cfm?BUS_ROUTE=”));
forms.push(new Array(’plicious’, “http://del.icio.us/slipperyp?submit=save&jump=no&url=”));
forms.push(new Array(’iyhy’, “http://www.iyhy.com/?b=”));
forms.push(new Array(’gfull’, “http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=ISO-8859-1&btnG=Google+Search&q=”));
forms.push(new Array(’dict’, “http://www.dict.org/bin/Dict?Form=Dict2&Database=*&Query=”));
forms.push(new Array(’rt’, “http://www.rottentomatoes.com/search/movie.php?search=”));
forms.push(new Array(’w', “http://www.wikipedia.org/search-redirect.php?language=en&search=”));

function setDefaults () {
// build search form
var inner = “
“;
for (i=0; i
inner += “” + forms[i][0] ;
}
inner += “

“;
dd.innerHTML = inner;

//…
}

Then on the page I have a small form which is filled in by that code onload.

And the end result works like this - type in some string, choose “gsearch” and click the “!” and it searches google. Type in “242,” choose “bus” and click the “!” and it gets the bus schedule for the bus I ride to work. Or paste in a URL, choose “plicious” and click the “!” and it’ll attempt to post a link to my set of delicious links (but you probably won’t be able to do that since you aren’t me on delicious).