Send Links To Friends In Three Taps With Launch Center Pro

iOS: We’ve discussed using Launch centre Pro to navigate through apps quickly on your iPhone, but that’s just scratching the surface of what the app can do. A little javascript can pull up the app to send links to friends instantly.

Federico Viticci at MacStories created this simple bookmarklet to share links with his team, but it’s easy to adapt for your own needs. Once you have Launch centre Pro installed, fire up an iPhone text editor and copy this code:

javascript:window.location='launchpro-messaging://?to=PHONENUMBER&body='+encodeURIComponent(document.title+'%5Cn%5Cn')+encodeURIComponent(location.href)+'&x-success='+encodeURIComponent(location.href)

Just replace “PHONENUMBER” with the phone number of someone you text frequently. You can even add multiple contacts for group messages by separating the phone numbers with commas (no spaces). Once you have the code ready, copy it to your clipboard and do the following:

1. Open up Safari and bookmark any page.
2. Edit the bookmark and replace its URL with the code on your clipboard.
3. Replace the title of the bookmark with the name of your recipient.

Now, whenever you select this bookmark, it will open Launch centre Pro with a pre-addressed and pre-written message containing the current webpage’s title and URL.

I love this trick, mostly because it adds the page’s title to the message automatically. iOS 6’s standard share sheet can create a message from within Safari, but it will only include the URL, and you’ll have to fill in the recipients by hand. I’ve gone so far as to create an entire subfolder of bookmarklets with common recipients to share links quickly.

Occasionally the bookmarklet will open up the main screen of Launch Center Pro, but not the in-app messaging screen. This only seems to happen when the app is launching from a cold start, so just go back to Safari and try again if you run into the same problem.

Launch centre Pro 1.1 [MacStories]