Evernote, Day One, or Instapaper are on this list

Sep 20, 2014 11:02 GMT  ·  By

Using iOS 8 on your phone will make you more productive and the best way to do that is to have an app with a bundled share extension. Developers have created some really good use cases for extensions and the square button with an arrow sticking up is slowly becoming your best friend.

First of all you need to make sure you have apps that have extensions and then enable the actual share extensions. To do that just open any page in Safari, tap on the Share button on the bottom of the screen and scroll the list of sharing extensions to the right. It is the one that starts with colored icons of Messages, Mail.

Add and sort

If you scroll all the way to the right you will see the "More" button that lets you either sort, or enable extra sharing options. You will see that Messages and Mail extensions cannot be turned off.

You can move them towards the end of the list if you really want to. There are a few other ones that come with iOS 8, like Twitter and Facebook. These can be enabled and moved at the end.

And then come the sharing extensions that will show up after you install the apps.

Do it faster

Instapaper is one of the most useful. Until now the Instapaper users were doing some hacking in order to add a link from Safari to Instapaper. There were two ways of doing that. You could send an email to your private Instapaper account and the link within that email would get scraped and added to your queue, or you could have a bookmarklet added to Safari on your Mac, sync it over to Safari on iOS and use it to get articles.

Instapaper was also using the clipboard method. Basically, you could copy a link, open Instapaper and then you were being asked if you want to add that link to your list. Now it's only one button and you're done. And don't forget Instapaper is now free and it has added functionality via in-app purchase.

Another awesome app that has a sharing extension is Day One. The journaling app that has won numerous awards and has only positive reviews from its users makes it even easier to add stuff to your Diary. You can send a photo with description to Day One from Photos, Camera Roll and other camera apps and you can also send links and other data to your daily notes.

Evernote is another great app that will make use of the share extension. With the latest update of the app you can clip content to Evernote from anywhere on your phone, save photos, documents and webpages as notes and file them in any personal or business notebook.

Other great apps that will get you some useful extensions are Omnifocus 2, Asana, LinkedIn, Flipboard, Transmit, Tumblr, Pocket, OneNote, Vimeo and Pinterest.