Just in time for Halloween, Pushpin is back from the dead! Pushpin was the best Pinboard bookmarking app on the iPhone and iPad, but it withered and sat in the store without updates since the iOS 9 days thanks, the developer says, to the arrival of a baby. Now, Pushpin is back, and with a few tweaks, it is just as great as ever.
Pinboard bookmarks
Pushpin is a client for the Pinboard bookmarking service, which lets you save and tag bookmarks to find later. Bookmarking services are great because they are available on any device, and they don’t live in your browser — they’re independent, so if you switch from Safari to Chrome you don’t lose your carefully-organized bookmarks.
Photo: Cult of Mac
Pushpin is a universal iPhone and iPad app which connects to Pinboard. Using its share extensions, you can save bookmarks from anywhere — Mobile Safari, for example — and tag them as you do it. But you can also use Pushpin as a read-later service, kind of like a trimmed-down version of Pocket or Instapaper. By marking a bookmark as unread when you save it, it will be added to your reading list. Bonus — Pushpin can download your unread bookmarks for offline reading.
New features in Pushpin
Right now, the developer of Pushpin, Lionheart Software, is steadily adding features that arrived in other apps a long time ago, in oder to bring it up to date. For instance, Pushpin now defaults to the Safari view when you load a bookmark to read. Previously it used a (still-available) custom reader view to make pages look clean while reading. In the last few iOS updates, though, Safari’s own Reader view has gotten so good that Pushpin prefers to use that instead.
Speaking of the read-later features, the latest Pushpin update added support for the 13-inch iPad Pro, so it doesn’t look all hanky and stretched when reading on a bigger screen.
Also, Apple’s San Francisco font is now the default.
The future of Pushpin
After the general fix up is done, I’m hoping for some true iOS 11 features to come to Pushpin. For instance, drag and drop would be great, if not for getting links into the app (the share extension already does a great job of that), then for organizing the bookmarks in-app, and for sharing them to other places. 3D Touch support would also be nice, as would more control over bulk-editing your tags, for example.
But really, Pushpin is already so good that it’s just great to have it back. You can enjoy all its existing features, like powerful (and saveable) searches, the ability to subscribe to a tag, or a user, to see all their shared bookmarks, plus a great-looking interface.
Pushpin is $10. There hasn’t been a paid update in five years, so if you’re an existing user, the developer is in the process of adding a tip-jar so we can contribute.
Welcome back!
Price: $9.99
Download: Pushpin for Pinboard from the App Store (iOS)
