Probably one of the most productive things you can do in setting up your iPhone is spend some time with Safari, even if you don’t use it, setting up some neatly organized bookmarks for the iPhone.
I preferred to make an “iPhone” folder at the top level of my Bookmarks Bar. Then I made a number of subfolders under that, such as Mobile Portals, Mobile Applications, Mobile Sites, Mobile RSS, etc. Then you have them handy on your iPhone without ever having to enter URLs on the iPhone.
Here are some of my top ones:
- Google Mobile
- Google Reader
- Wikipedia (unofficial by PowerSet)
- CityTools Ambient News
- MSN
- FaceBook (still more complete than the native application through the App Store)
- Uh…Where (zip codes and area code lookups)
- iNetwork Test (maybe slower than native version but without the springboard space)
- GasBuddyToGo (still no native gas price app?)
- PocketBar
- Zagat Mobile (the best restaurant reviews, period; someday I’ll buy the subscription!)
Right click in Safari to copy the link rather than going to the site, so you have a non-re-directed link.
Find some more at AppSafari or at Apple’s web apps page.
Bookmarks won’t sync
But what to do if your bookmarks aren’t syncing through MiniMe, ah MobileMe, which is a common problem? Refer to this Apple Discussions post, which advises:
Paste the following line* in Terminal, then hit enter:
/Applications/Safari.app/Contents/SafariSyncClient.app/Contents/MacOS/SafariSyncClient --unregistersyncclient com.apple.Safari
You should get a response of:
YES
Then, paste this line* in Terminal and hit enter:
/Applications/Safari.app/Contents/SafariSyncClient.app/Contents/MacOS/SafariSyncClient --register
* Each of these single line commands have been broken into two for browser diplay. Each should actually be separated by a single space.
You should get a response along the lines of:
2008-03-23 09:21:08.106 SafariSyncClient LightweightMallornLoginSession is registered. YES
Then try syncing. You should be good to go.
If not, you may want to reset bookmark syncs from your computer, replacing data on MobleMe also. Do this from System Preferences -> MobileMe (.Mac on Tiger) -> Sync -> Advanced -> Reset Sync Data. Note you are able with Leopard to reset only the bookmarks and not everything else.
Hopefully we won’t need to do this constantly and Apple will fix this bug in an OS X update.
