A Smart way to resume reading your web links from Pc to Mobile
Recently I opened up a tutorial on my PC, read it half way but then decided to leave my workstation but wanted to continue reading it on my phone. I thought of a quickest way to open that site on my phone but could not find one.
All the methods that occurred to me such as Bookmarking the url and then open the Chrome browser on my phone and look up the link was not feasible enough at the time. Nor was copying the link to post it in a Slack channel on my PC and then open the Slack application on my phone and click the link.
Since I could not think of an effective way to open the same page on my phone, I decided to develop both a Chrome extension which converts the current URL into a Qrcode and an Android application that would read the Qrcode and convert it back into text or rather a URL. Click on the link below to download the app.
The beauty about the Android application is that it can read a wide range of barcodes not Qrcodes. The application validates the data read from the Barcode and if it’s a URL, it offers an option of opening it in the in-app browser so that you are able to pick off from where you had stopped. There is also an option of sharing this URL with your friends or workmates using the different sharing options or applications available on Android as shown in the Youtube video below.
On the other hand if it is not a URL, it cannot be opened by the in-applicaton browser. The good news is that the data from the Barcode can still be shared easily across social media apps and all the other apps that allow content sharing.
This has enabled me to read a lot on the go and in a timely manner other than waiting for the link to be sent via Slack and read its content later or even totally forget about it.
I am making this extension and application accessible to everyone by publishing the Chrome extension on the Chrome store and the Android app on the PlayStore. Later I will release the both the Chrome extension and Android application code on Github for everyone to access and change it as they wish.
The Android application is very small (2MB) and you can download it here and also the Chrome extension from here. Feel free to recommend them to your friends.
