Link Forwarding

Unite 5 introduces an innovative feature known as Link Forwarding, a successor to the previous 'Intelligent Whitelisting' function found in previous Unite releases. This feature provides granular control over how your Unite app handles different URLs, enabling you to create a tailored browsing experience within your app.

Link Forwarding can be enabled at the time of app creation or later within a created app.

Setting up Link Forwarding

1. Open your Unite app, click on your app name in the menu bar, and select 'Settings' (⌘ ,).
2. Select Link Forwarding
3. You will see a toggle with two tabs – 'Allowed' and 'Redirect'.

Allowed Tab

In the 'Allowed' tab, you can specify which URLs should be allowed within your app:

• By default, your app can browse any URL.
  • If you enable Link Forwarding at the time of app creation, Unite will attempt to intelligently allow the primary URL and redirect all other URLs.
• If you wish to restrict your app to certain URLs, check the box labeled 'Only allow specified URLs'. This will enable you to add URLs to the list below.
• You can also decide whether to allow sub-domains for these URLs.

Redirect Tab

The 'Redirect' tab offers more advanced URL handling options:

• On the left, there's a table where you can add URLs that you want to manage.

  On the right, you have three choices:

  • 'Redirect all non-allowed URLs' (this is on by default) sends any URL not explicitly allowed to another destination.

    'Open links in background' (off by default) opens new links in the background.

    For each URL in the table, you can specify where non-allowed URLs should be redirected:

    • 'To browser' lets you choose from a list of system browsers (the default is your system's default browser).
    • 'To application' lets you select from a list of Unite apps.
    • You can select one or multiple URLs in the table and set where they should redirect, or uncheck 'redirect selected URLs' to block the URL entirely.

Why Link Forwarding?

Link Forwarding empowers you to create a highly customized browsing experience within your Unite apps. For example, you could build a Gmail Unite app that only opens links from Gmail or Google, with all other links opening in your default browser, similar to a native email client. This feature brings you one step closer to bridging the gap between web and native apps, making your workflow smoother and more intuitive.