As many of you know, it’s possible to make a hotspot link in a Mag+ issue that automatically opens a pre-populated e-mail. Just hit the Add Link button and put “mailto://” followed by the e-mail address in the URL field. You can even pre-populate the subject line by typing (fill in your own address and subject) “mailto://support@magplus.com?subject=Help!”. Very cool feature for letting users communicate directly with your editors or writers.
But the one limitation I could never figure out is how to pre-populate the body section. In a traditional mailto: link, you’d just add “&body=Check out this awesome app!” after the subject. But when we’ve tried that in the Mag+ plug-in, it never picks up the body, just the subject. If you could pre-populate the body and leave the To: field blank, you’ve essentially created a way to let people share via email story text or, say, a recipe, just by tapping a button.
Now, Garrett, a designer at one of our newest clients, Nomad Editions, has figured out a cool hack to make this possible:
1. Create your mailto link URL here: http://email.about.com/library/misc/blmailto_encoder.htm This is the place you’ll enter all the fields you want pre-populated, like subject and body. You’ll have to fill in a to: address, but you can remove it from the output code. If you do, the beginning of the code should look like this: “mailto:?subject=”
2. Now take that whole output code and shorten it at tinyurl.com.
3. Place the shortened link you get back from tinyurl in the URL field for your hotspot. When the user taps it, it will briefly open a web window, but then switch quickly to the user’s e-mail program.
That’s it! Nomad will be using this to share recipes from their great digital-only mag, RealEats as soon as the Mag+ version launches, later this month.
