Booky the Bookmark Manager
As an active user of the web, at some point I ran into problems managing all the interesting sites which I wanted to save. The problem is that all browsers have more or less the same way to deal with bookmarks, a simple folder hierarchy. This is all fine and good if you have a moderate amount of bookmarks but with a web-surfing pattern like me, this does not suffice.
I tend to browse a large number of websites, scavenging all the useful bits of information and saving them to my favorites. If a site has some information which I might find remotely useful in some distant future situation, I want to hold on to it. At some point, this approach let to the limits of the browsers' usefulness; it was simply too hard to determine where in the huge file structure to place the bookmarks.
This was the point where I began using perpetually open browser tabs as a sort of bookmark limbo, they were too useful to abandon but not useful enough that I would endure the overhead of finding a spot for them in the dreadful hierarchy. Obviously, this was an unstable situation at best so this predicament led to my quest for a better bookmark management system.
A quick survey with Google image search indicated that there were no alternatives which did not use the same horrible abstraction for managing bookmarks. This suited me well as an idea for a better solution had begun to take root at the back of my mind.
The premise was simple, a small, easily accessible app which would allow you to enter and search for bookmarks based on tags.
"Booky"
As always, naming is tricky. I have really tried to come up with a cooler name, but so far the name has stuck. It does allow for some nifty letter rhymes, though ;) The program is written in C#, using WPF and .NET 3.5 and is currently nearing the completion of the second beta release.
The design principles have remained simple: the program must be browser agnostic, the user interface must do everything in its power to facilitate an efficient user experience (the less time spent in the program, the better), when not in use it must make as little noise as possible and, finally, it must be pretty looking :) For that last part, you can judge my humble design skills for yourself:
For my part, I can say that the program is immensely helpful and I find myself using it more or less daily. It starts with Windows and then patiently sits waiting in the systray until you need its services. Once activated, the UI shown above appears (without the search results, obviously). All the common commands of the program are avaiable through shortcuts which makes the user experience very fluent and painless.
For instance, if you want to create a bookmark, simply paste an url into the search field and press F1. This brings forth the relevant dialog, which politely suggest a title for the bookmark (from the page title - if available). Just fill out the list of associated tags and press Enter (or Escape to cancel). This illustrates the main goal of the program which is to reduce the amount of time spent managing bookmarks and to encourage more aggressive bookmarking.
Get the Program
Booky requires the .NET framework 3.5 to run (on the client profile version is needed). If you're unsure what version you have, you can go here to find out.
The program is free to use and I have no plans for that to change once the program goes out of beta (I'm not planning for this to be one of those perpetual beta apps which seem to flood the web these days).
Feedback
If you have any comments or feedback on the program I would love to hear about it, especially if you found any bugs or have difficulties using the program. Just throw me a mail at withoutprecedence@gmail.com.
Changelog
Beta 2
- The program now comes packaged in an installer rather than a collection of files.
- Autocomplete for tag searches has been replaced by a dropdown menu with all the matching tags.
- Searching for tags now matches substrings, i.e. searching for patterns will also match design patterns.
- Better parsing of page titles for bookmark title and better handling of special characters.
- The systray icon now has a context menu showing the 5 most recently visited links for quick launching as well as an exit button.
- Set the program to always start in lower right corner.
- Fixed several bugs and inconsistencies with GUI behavior.
- Fixed issues which caused the program to crash when writing tags.
- Fixed a number of miscellaneous bugs and issues.
