I often find myself reading some long web page on my Mac, and wishing I had an easy way to “throw” it over to my iPhone so I could continue reading on the go. Emailing the link to myself was one way to handle it - and with the Messages app, I could “text” the link to myself - but I always wished there was an easier way.

Apple’s Handoff functionality is great, but you have to be using Safari - and, well, I prefer Google Chrome.

So when I saw the linkthrow.com domain was available, I snatched it up! And then…sat on it for three years without doing anything. But I finally set aside a couple weekends to work on it, and the site is now live: LinkThrow.com

It only works with Chrome and iOS right now, but I’ll probably build an Android app and some more browser extensions if there’s any demand.

How it works

It’s pretty straightforward:

• Install the extension for Chrome.

• Install the mobile app on your iPhone or iPad - be sure to choose Yes when asked if you want to receive push notifications. It won’t work otherwise.

• The mobile app will give you a six-character code - enter that code in the browser extension and you can start throwing links. Throwing a link to the phone sends a push notification, and sliding to open the push notification launches the page in mobile Safari.

What I learned

This was also a learning exercise for me. I hadn’t had much opportunity to play around with MongoDB, so I’m using that for the back end. Spring Data made it very simple to integrate with the app. I did find Mongo’s security a bit confusing - I somehow ended locking myself out of my own database! I finally decided to leave “auth” disabled and just block outside access at the network level, using Amazon’s VPC permissions. Easy enough to just tunnel in if I need to.

I also had never done a Chrome extension before, so that was a first. It’s basically just a block of HTML with some Javascript to handle the Ajax calls. What’s nice is once I add my iPhone on one Mac, I can throw to it from all my Macs, since extensions are tied to your Google account and shared across all devices.