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Comment by kstrauser | Hacker News Reader

I'm a huge fan of Pinboard. I like that it has a clear I-am-the-customer profit model, and it's performed flawlessly for me for several years now.

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Instapaper used to feel like that when Marco still owned it. What is different to me is that because it was primarily an iOS-revenue driven app, it feel like it caught up in the Apple-inspired race to the bottom revenue-wise. Pinboard feels decidedly more indie-web and therefore perhaps less popular but more stable.

+1. Been using Pinboard for a couple years now, it's worked perfectly.

Are there apps that work with Pinboard? I'd like to support it, but I want to be able to background sync my saved stuff to my phone, like I do with Pocket.

Unfortunately there are no good iOS apps for it. The only decent one, Pinner, decided, inexplicably, to drop iOS 9 support as soon as iOS 10 was released. iOS 9 is still fully supported by Apple. (Using iOS 10 isn’t an option for me for now). The iOS 9 version’s share extension still has a few bugs that completely block the third-party apps’ UI when adding URLs. Also the Pinner developer never responds to any support requests. I’ve tried sending him emails and hit him up on Twitter. He is completely silent.

All the other iOS apps I’ve tried are laughably crippled. One of the apps I tried (Pinswift) still opens all links in an embedded web view, which means I couldn’t easily log into any sites because I’d have to copy and paste the credentials and OTP manually (NYTimes, WaPost, GitHub, etc). This also means no ad blocking or other protections and functionality offered by the SafariViewController feature in iOS.

I’d also expect for $9.99 plus a $1.99 for “Premium Fonts” Pushpin for Pinboard to be excellent but it isn’t. It’s unstable and its share extension isn’t as flexible as Pinner’s.

That said, Pinboard is a good service. It cares about my privacy, which is very important to me, and has the features I need for a bookmarking service. It is not a read-later service. For example, the article caching features that it provides is web-only and isn’t available through the API so no third-party app can integrate it. This means there is no truly offline reading experience since I’d have to have access to the Pinboard website if I want to read a cached link.

Do you know if there is any good software for windows and/or Linux (Ubuntu specifically) for pinboard? Nothing seems to be actually good, and Pinner seems to be the first client I've seen that actually looks good.

EDIT: Windows would be the main win for me if a good client exists, as that's my main OS. I only use Ubuntu at work.

Sorry, I don’t. ReadKit on OS X is decent (and is the only native Mac app that I could find that actually integrates the Pinboard API) but I don’t know of anything else on other platforms.

I’ll have to start looking for this, soon, however. I’m seriously considering switching. Another service that seems to have no native clients on Windows or Linux is Feedbin.

It used to be that one could find tons of native apps for Windows for pretty much anything. Now there’re hardly any for popular services. I’m not sure if this is because of Microsoft’s seemingly schizophrenia approach to their office APIs (is it MFC? Win32? WinForms? XAML? UWP? Something else?) and their lack of focus or just the iPhone and mobile computing’s “halo” effect.

For me, Pinner's share extension blocks the app's UI while it's saving still in iOS 10.

This is unfortunate as I thought an iOS 10-only update was supposed to fix this. Goes to show that the Pinner developer doesn’t care about providing any support.

There are several third party apps - I'm using Pinner, and it means I can save pages on the go from the usual share menu, and of course access my saved links.

Sure. Pinner for iOS looks good, works well, and has a share extension to allow you send pages from Safari directly to Pinboard. I like Spillo for macOS for the same reasons.

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