Pushpin 3.1 update
The recent 3.1 update to Pushpin — our pick for best iOS Pinboard client — added a slew of awesome features that make it even easier to navigate around the app and find things you’re looking for. The most prominent new features are external keyboard shortcuts, the ability to reorder/hide sections in the navigation menu, and custom feeds (which are sort of like saved searches).
The keyboard shortcuts are certainly welcome, although I’ll admit that a few of them feel less than intuitive. Scrolling up and down through the bookmarks list using J and K is a familiar way of doing things, but to open or edit a bookmark, you have to use CMD+O or CMD+E respectively. I could be missing the logic here, but why not just use O and E?
Aside from that minor quibble, I’m loving all of the new additions. Being able to hide the many sections of Pinboard that I never use (such as Wikipedia and Fandom) makes the navigation bar much easier to parse. The only sections I now keep visible are: All, Starred, Popular, and Network.
Having custom feeds saved to the navigation bar is also neat, if you’re the type of user that regularly searches for tag combinations. As I mentioned in my review of Pushpin, I could always search for bookmarks that were tagged with both “creativity” and “inspiration,” but now I can have those items saved to a feed in the nav bar, accessible with a single tap.
These custom feeds can also include items saved by other users. Let’s say I wanted to have a feed that watches for any new items bookmarked by Brett Terpstra that are also tagged with “Markdown“. Here’s the process:
Open nav bar > Tap “Edit” > Tap “Add Feed” > Fill out the username field (in this case, “ttscoff”) and enter “markdown” into the tags field > Tap “Save”
The custom feed appears like this in the nav bar: u:ttscoff+t:markdown. Just tap that button and it will display the appropriate bookmarks from Brett’s account. Obviously, this will only work with users who display their bookmarks publicly.
With this 3.1 update, Pushpin has further cemented itself as the top player in the field of iOS Pinboard clients. We’re looking forward to even more awesome updates in the future.