InFocus: A neat Web app that lets you highlight webpages and send ‘focused’ links

Do you ever need to send links to friends or colleagues that highlight only a specific section of a webpage? If so, read on, as this neat little Web app could be what you’re looking for.

InFocus works via a bookmarklet which you can drag and drop into your browser, or a Chrome extension. Alternatively, you can simply copy & paste the URL of the webpage into the little box, and click ‘Get Focus’:

Using handles you can then drag a highlight box to and focus on a specific part of a webpage – be it a chunk of text, an image or whatever. You then click ‘Test It’ or ‘Copy URL’ and you have a dedicated URL which will let you send (or even bookmark for yourself) the highlighted segment to others. Click on the image below to see an example:

As soon as you move your mouse on the ‘focused’ page, the highlighting disappears. If you want it to re-highlight the sender’s segment, you simply hit ‘Show Focus’. If you want to exit the screen altogether and visit the original webpage in all its glory, hit ‘Exit Focus’.

There are a number of other webpage highlighting tools out there, such as Marker.to, a similar idea to InFocus which we wrote about last year. At the time, Marker.to was only available as a Chrome extension, but it is now available for Firefox and Safari too, though Internet Explorer is a glaring omission. Blog or website owners can also add a widget to their homepage, which lets visitors highlighting directly from the site.

InFocus, however, is a handy little tool which, because of its bookmarklet and copy/paste URL feature, can easily be used across most modern browsers.

➤ InFocus