Me, on Twitter, a few weeks ago:

What I was referring to is Push Pop, a system for pushing web pages from a mobile device and having them pop open in a desktop browser. Let me explain.

I often find myself discovering content on my mobile device that I want to consume when I get back to my desk. Sometimes the thing is work-related. Or designed with only desktop browsers in mind. Other times I’m in a hurry and want to return to it later.

I think of it as the opposite use case of how I use Instapaper.

Now, you may be thinking: “Just use Chrome or Safari’s tab syncing, dummy!”

Three things about that:

  1. Neither of those things existed when I first prototyped Push Pop.
  2. I use Chrome on desktop and Safari on mobile. I don’t want lock in.
  3. Tab syncing requires me to poll the browser for content. I want these things staring at me in the face when I return to my desktop.

For a long time I just emailed myself links. When I got sick of that I built Push Pop instead. It works great!

Push Pop is a combination of a browser extension and a bookmarklet. The bookmarklet pushes pages up to a Heroku server which then pushes them down to the extension.

I’d really like to remove the middle man, but I couldn’t think of a way to get that done.

The only extension I created was for Chrome, but the whole thing is open source so if you want to use Push Pop with a different browser, please lend a hand.