www.cut

This isn't one of those immersive applications that takes hours to figure out and weeks to master. Instead it's a small but useful utility that shortens URLs for you so that they can be emailed, Twittered or Facebooked without worrying about character counts or line breaks messing up the link.

www.cut -- we like to pronounce it "dub cut" -- goes out of its way to make your life simple. Start the app with a URL on the clipboard and it shortens it and puts it back. Enter an already shortened URL and it lengthens it. Add your long and complicated bit.ly API key on your iPad and it uses iCloud to sync it back over to your iPhone.

Of course you can also use the iOS 8 action extension, type the URL manually or, in Safari, add "wwwcut:" to the start of a URL.

www.cut currently supports six shortening services:

* is.gd
* bit.ly
* tinyurl.com
* to.ly
* uCut.it
* tiny.cc

The ones that support it allow you to log in so that statistics about your links can be gathered.

And once shortened, you can share it using any service that supports iOS's share extensions (including ShareEverywhere) without leaving www.cut.

Simple but effective. That's www.cut.