Update – 2018-01-05

Over at Six Colors, Jason Snell has created a much smarter, safer version of this whole iOS to Mac automation idea.

His version, smartly, builds the shell script on the Mac side — only receiving keywords and URLs from the iOS device — as opposed to my version which is set up to just immediately run whatever text file shell script happens to pop up in my Dropbox folder. A less-than-ideal setup should someone else acquire access to that Dropbox folder. Go check it out.

This may be one of the laziest automation tools I've ever created, but I solves an annoyance that's been bugging me for a long while now.

Often times I'll be looking at a website on my iPhone and I'll want to switch over to viewing it on my Mac. "That's why Apple created Handoff," you say. Yes, well, personally I find Handoff to be slow, unreliable, and only half of the solution.

I'm looking at a website on my phone. I want to press a button on my phone and have that website open in Safari on my Mac. I don't want to wait for a dock icon to appear on my Mac. I don't want to try to click on it, quickly, before it disappears. I don't want to look through a list of open iCloud tabs in Safari on my Mac.

I want to tap and have it open.

What I Did

I used everyone's favorite iOS automation tool Workflow.app to create an Application Extension Workflow that grabs the current URL and saves it to a date/time stamped text file in a specific Dropbox folder. It looks like this:

Then, I set up Hazel on my Mac to monitor that folder and, when it sees a new file, run the file with Bash, then throw it in the Trash. Here's what that looks like:

Overly complicated? Probably.

Lazy? Almost certainly.

Does it do the job I wanted it to do? Absolutely.

It takes about 6 seconds from tapping on the Workflow in Safari on my phone to having an open page in Safari on my Mac. That's not exactly fast, but it's no slower than using Handoff. It's also far more reliable and requires less interaction from me.

And, let's not forget, this will work from any distance. There's no Bluetooth range limit like Handoff. Wherever you are, as long as you've got an internet connection, you can use this Workflow to have a website open and waiting for you on your Mac when you get home.