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Instagram now lets you bookmark photos and videos
For some, Instagram is a place to see what your friends and family have been up to. For others, it's an app for marvelling at beautiful food, furniture and places captured by skilled photographers. Like Pinterest, these photos can serve as inspiration for users' own dreams and personal projects. With this in mind, Instagram is adding a bookmark icon underneath each post in your feed. Tap it and the relevant photo or video will be added to a private page accessible from your profile. There are no folders or "boards," so everything is lumped together, but it's certainly simpler than keeping a text document full of random Instagram links.
Pocket's Explore tab adds more reading suggestions
Pocket is one of the slickest bookmarking services for reading on the web, but its strength was never discovering new things to read. Starting today, it's hoping to fix that with a new Explore tab at the top of its homepage: type in what you're looking to read about, and off you go. Trending stories will line up alongside articles that other users have substantially saved. Related topics are also included, if you really have some hours to kill. The feature is in beta at the moment, but Explore doesn't require a login. You just... browse. Possibly forever.
Now you can bookmark Google image searches for later reference
Normally, image searches on Google are ephemeral things and gone the moment you close the browser tab. However, a new feature on the search giant's mobile version makes saving the images you find as easy as bookmarking a webpage. In fact, it's the identical process: simply search for whatever phrase you want, pick the images you like and tap the star icon to save them. You can also organize these saved images into folders, thereby eliminating the need to run the search again later. The new feature is already available to mobile users in the US running both Android and iOS.
Instapaper launches on Android devices
Instapaper creator Marco Arment has been kept so busy with the iOS version that he decided to contract out the Android iteration to Mobelux. Fortunately, this is the same developer that crafted Tumblr apps for both the iPhone and Android, so we can breathe a collective sigh of relief. Available today, priced just shy of $3, Instapaper ties together one of iOS' favorites with Android's capacity for sharing across multiple apps. It arrives cocooned in a decidedly classy UI, even on our Gingerbread devices -- although it does get a little squashed in some sub-menus. As long as you're running an Android version higher than 2.2, hit up the source below to give it a try.
Quickly share website addresses to your iPhone with AirLink
Last week, Erica and Victor shared a hack for transferring the URL of an open webpage from your computer to your iPhone via the intermediary of a QR code. It's easy and quick, but as is often the case our astute commenters pointed to a slew of alternative solutions to tackle the same problem. The suggestions were wide-ranging and clever. There's Ansible, Handoff and MyPhoneDesktop; there's NotesForLater, SendTab and SiteToPhone. All are worth checking out, and depending on how you like your content shared (in an app, in email, with or without push notifications, using a browser extension or via a bookmarklet) you'll find a solid fit. But the one that specifically caught our eye -- and had the most commenter recommendations -- was the AirLink bookmarklet. AirLink is dead simple to set up and use. Just visit the site to install; you'll get a pair of bookmarklets, one for your desktop browser and one for your device. These bookmarks are 'twinned' to each other permanently, so at any time thereafter all you need to do is activate the bookmarklet (on either side) to send the active URL to your device or to your computer. On your iPhone, you can bookmark the URL or add it to the home screen for instant access. It's free, it's easy and it works great. The AirLink bidirectional bookmarklet is the work of the young German developer Phillip Schmitt. You can follow the ongoing development of AirLink on the tool's Twitter feed. Photo: Flickr CC via Cliff1066™
Instapaper gets iPad refresh: more friends, more reading
Instapaper, the internet equivalent of a bookmark, has been given a top-to-toe makeover for its latest outing on the iPad. Fear not, your reading materials remain easy to read (and ad-free), but version 4 has now been smoothed over with a thick layer of tablet gloss. Navigation is all done through a bar on the left, and remains available for prodding as you read through your article selection. The upgrade also adds a subscription option for searching all your previous reads, as well as better social skills, with the ability to pick up and store articles and posts shared by your Twitter buddies -- ensuring that you'll probably never run out of reading material again.
Xmarks calls it quits
I've been a big fan of Xmarks for a while now -- I work on a few Macs and PCs regularly, and while MobileMe is nice, I've always appreciated Xmarks' ease of use (after a one-time setup, it basically worked automatically) and compatibility across whatever browsers I happened to use. That's why I was disappointed to hear yesterday that they're calling it quits. Around 90 days from now, the servers will shut down, and Xmarks will be no more. Co-founder Todd Agulnick goes through the story of the service on that blog post. It was originally developed as Foxmarks, and it was designed to work directly with the Firefox browser to sync bookmarks there. Eventually, they brought in large numbers of users with tons of bookmarks in their browsers, but the company struggled to try and find a way to make money off of those numbers. Search became a main target, and if you're an Xmarks user, you'll know the 'tags" that would appear on Google Search pages in the browsers. But despite initial interest, that never took off, and after unsuccessfully finding a buyer for the company this past spring, Agulnick says the end has come. Fortunately, there are bookmark syncing alternatives, and most of the browsers these days have options built-in (which is why Xmarks won't move to a subscription service -- hard to sell something most browsers are offering for free). But I'll pour some out for Xmarks -- it was an excellent service. I'm just sorry it couldn't find a profitable place to settle down.
EVE Online's deep safe spot nerf to be deployed on Tuesday
Safe spots are an integral part of EVE Online's tactical warfare, making it harder for other players to locate and consequently destroy your ship. They're created by making a bookmark while in warp, which causes the bookmark to lead to the middle of nowhere. When you're on the run from bad guys, you can often slip away by warping between several safe spots while they try desperately to scan you down. Deep safe spots are illegal bookmarks created far outside the bounds of a solar system. Pilots hiding here needn't bother warping around to evade pursuers, as they'll be quite literally off the grid and virtually impossible to locate. Deep safe spots several hundred AU from the nearest celestial object have also been used in the past to jump huge capital fleets into a hostile system without fear of being attacked.
HTC promises fix for Droid Incredible's ne'er-to-forget browser
In case you missed the recent excitement, a "feature" of HTC's Droid Incredible was found whereby the Sense UI bookmarking widget would take random screenshots of your web browsing experience and put them in a folder that's nigh impossible to delete, even after resetting to factory settings. Looks like the company knows about the issue, acknowledging it in a statement and promising a fix "in the near future." It also suggests a different reset to fix the mess, which apparently is to select "Format Phone Storage" from the "SD Card and Phone Storage" settings menu. Let us know if you have any luck with this and please, be careful about your browsing habits if you're worried what might be hanging around.
Friday Favorite: HistoryHound, bookmark with abandon
Today's Friday Favorite is a new one to me, but it's been around for a while. I just picked up the latest version of HistoryHound from St. Clair Software -- more famous, probably, for Default Folder X -- and have been using it constantly for days. Its hotkey already has its own spot in my muscle memory. Here's what it does: HistoryHound indexes bookmarks, history and cache from all of your browsers, with presets for Camino, Firefox 2 & 3, Flock, iCab, OmniWeb, Opera, Safari, Shiira and URL Manager Pro. It means being able to bookmark willy-nilly in any browser and know that you'll be able to quickly locate noteworthy sites again, in any application. Not just the bookmarks, though; in the background -- with a very low footprint -- HistoryHound starts indexing the full text of each page. Then you can search for exact or fuzzy matches, or with Spotlight-style boolean keywords for any text on the landing page. Search comes in two flavors: a tiny popup panel which can be assigned to a hotkey and provides a list of matches as you type, and a full, Webkit-enabled search window with page previews and a multi-column result list.
SayAgain - an audio bookmarking app
A few weeks ago we covered the Bookmark app, a subsystem for playing and bookmarking audio books. I was quite impressed with it, but some comments dinged it for not playing in the background when the app is closed. It also only handled audiobooks and some felt it would be more useful if it covered any audio file in your iTunes library. SayAgain [iTunes Link] is another bookmarking app which solves both of those problems, but not nearly as well or as elegantly. It is compatible with the iPhone and iPod touch and requires iPhone OS 3.0 or later. It sells for US$1.99.One of my pet-peeves is that many apps give you no instruction on how they work, and SayAgain is one of those. When you run it you are presented with a lined screen titled 'Annotated Media'. To the left is a + button and to the right is an edit button. Now what? Clicking on the developer link in iTunes brings you no help, only a description of what the app does. Nowhere in the app is an info button to bring some direction. But, one might say, it's intuitive. You don't need help. I say, nonsense. Everyone comes from a different level of experience and assuming intuitiveness is a bad assumption. Bookmark, on the other hand, gives full instructions and a tutorial right inside the app.SayAgain is a generalist audio bookmarking app, allowing you to add bookmarks to any audio file in iTunes. This is quite useful since you might want to bookmark a story in podcast or even a great drum solo as well as a place in an audiobook. There are two ways to use it. Either play something in iTunes and then run the app which will display your audio file as Now playing, along with the name of the song or file. Or you can run it without playing anything and hit the + button which brings up iTunes. Leaving the app doesn't stop the audio, a major advantage. To add a book mark you click the star (which in other apps means favorites), and you'll get a window with a keyboard and buttons to 'Set start marker' and 'Set end marker'. On top of the screen are buttons marked back and play. Read on to see how well it worked.
The Bookmark App: Audiobooks finally done right
The Bookmark app [iTunes Link] has solved a number of problems I've always suffered while listening to audiobooks on an iPhone. It isn't pefect yet, but what is currently in the app store is the best implementation of digital audiobook listening I've found. It's earned a place on my home page and that alone is quite a recommendation. I'll get to a play-by-play in a bit, but first a bit of context is in order. I have always been a fan of audiobooks. Long before the inception of the iPod, I was a constant Books on Tape customer. I'd choose a book and in a few days, receive a sizable box filled with anywhere from two to over forty cassette tapes. It was worth it to me to go through all the hassle of keeping the tapes in order and carrying a stack of them with me to play on a portable cassette player when I wasn't listening in my car. When the iPod came out, I found Audible.com and life became much easier. I always carried at least a dozen books with me on my iPod Classic. The books usually downloaded in one or two big files making a book easy to manage. A few years later, Audible.com started embedding chapter markers in their books so jumping to a particular chapter was a snap, but I always had a problem with the iPod losing my place in a book. It could have been due to syncing, or being knocked around, but it was constant and always annoying. When I bought my iPhone, I found the way the iPod module handled audiobooks had changed. Instead of downloading a few big files, what wound up in the library was a separate file for each chapter. So, for example, Fool by Christopher Moore, which my iPod Classic saw as one file with twenty-six chapters, appeared to be twenty-six files on the iPhone. That would have been fine, except for the fact that the iPhone was no better than my iPod Classic in losing my place seemingly at random. Worse, I never knew which file I was on when my place got lost. Read on to see how Bookmark has solved this dilemma for me.
Twisted Nether Wiki compiles a nice list of WoW utilities
A few folks over at the Twisted Nether Wiki have done a great thing and compiled a nice full list of all of those little online WoW utilities that we talk about every once in a while. From character improvement tools like Be Imba! to resources like Kaliban's Loot Lists and even humor sites like WoWBash, if it's online, WoW-related, and worth visiting more than once, it's on this list.And of course it's a wiki, so even if it's not on that list, you can add it. But it is cool to have all of those resources in one place -- we mention them, obviously, when there are updates to share, but if you don't bookmark them when you hear about them, they might have fallen off your radar. There are so many great and well-designed tools out there for players to use that something like this, tracking them all, is great to have.
iLolcats on your iPhone
Looking for a cheezburger to go with your iPhone? You're in luck. The goofballs (and I say that with fondest affection) over at ICanHasCheezburger have created an official iPhone app so you can cart the cats around with you wherever you go. Just bookmark this on your phone's Safari browser and whenever you visit you'll be greeted by the 30 most recent lolcat pictures. It even updates every time there's a new post. Don't have an iPhone? To dream and drool, check out the demo page the creators put together (it's only viewable on a Mac). Now this site needs the same treatment.
Chibi-Robo encourages reading, smelling
A GoNintendo reader received this Chibi-Robo: Park Patrol bookmark at school. It has a feature that the DS game can't possibly have: scents. We assume that scratching the adorable-faced flower things releases a delightful floral scent. This is the best scratch-and-sniff game item since the CyberSniff 2000 (which did actually add a smell component to the gameplay of Leisure Suit Larry 7). It's a little incongruous that Nintendo is putting such energy into promoting this game when they're putting considerably less into making it available. We're in the same predicament with the bookmark as we are with the game: since we're not in school, we can't get our hands on this, much like the lack of nearby Wal-Marts makes it more difficult to purchase the game.
Waggle while you read
Continuing the "things that look like Wiimotes but aren't" theme: Remember reading? Not on a screen, but in, like, these stacks of paper that are all stuck together on one side? I think they're called ... strategy guides?* Yeah, this Perler bead bookmark is for those.We like how the natural properties of the Perler-bead-made Wiimote (the long, rectangular shape and the flatness, basically) lend themselves to use as a bookmark. The crafter probably made this without any intended purpose and realized only later how perfect it would be to mark pages. If only the yarn were on the other end and grey, the illusion would be complete.*Full disclosure: as a librarian, this blogger is required to know what a book is.[Via Wonderland]
AppleScripts for integrating Safari, NetNewsWire, del.icio.us and Yojimbo - oh my!
I don't know how I missed this post at Hawk Wings a few weeks ago, but I am glad I found it at least sooner or later: Tim Gaden has been keeping a watchful eye on the Yojimbo mailing list, and he caught a set of scripts written by Dylan Damian that can take a link from either Safari or NetNewsWire, bookmark it on del.icio.us with Pukka (which I highly recommend as a paid user) and then archive the link in Yojimbo using the same tags you used on del.icio.us. I completely agree with Tim: after testing these scripts out with NetNewsWire, they work like a charm and have just been added to my toolbelt.You can score the scripts by checking the Yojimbo mailing list archives (they're online here if you aren't subscribed), or simply by heading over to Tim's post at Hawk Wings, as he is hosting the files himself.
SafariDepot: who needs .Mac to sync bookmarks?
Striking another blow to .Mac's usefulness, SafariDepot allows bookmark synchronization over FTP and FTPS (secure FTP). It's actually a clever little app that also includes a couple of scripts that are ripe for automation through Quicksilver, Login Items, cron jobs, and more. It's also smart about downloading and replacing Safari's local bookmarks: once a download is run, it will automatically restart Safari (if it's running) and backup your local copy before replacing it with the version from your server.SafariDepot might not have that "it just works" aura about it that .Mac Safari syncing does (since you have to roll your own automation or *gasp* run it manually), but it's certainly yet another alternative to one of .Mac's prized features.[via MacUser]
dead.licious - bookmark verification made simple
Online bookmaking systems are all the rage these days (I certainly rely on nothing but Pukka, delibar and Quicksilver's del.icio.us plugin now), but what if, while amassing your library of 'marks, some of them go dead, are taken down or otherwise disappear? dead.licious might just be the tool for you, as it's a utility that checks each of your links to see if at least something is still there.It isn't quite everything it could be, however, as the author lists a number of improvements already on the list: Support for 10.3.9 and maybe 10.2.8. E-mail me if you really, really want this tool for 10.3.9 and I'll see what I can do to expedite the process along (donations wouldn't hurt either). Faster checking of websites by checking several at once instead of one at a time. Keychain support so you don't have to type in your username and password each time. Determining which websites have been added since the last update and only checking those. Editing bookmark information and submitting the changes back to your del.icio.us account. With this in mind, a discussion of whether dead.licious should even be called a 1.0 app could certainly be warranted, but instead of getting nit-picky over version guidelines, why not give it a whirl and submit some feedback (and a buck or two while you're at it) to show the dev you care.
Delibar update fixes login problems
I wish I had more to say about this update, like it doubles your Mac's performance or solves world hunger, but it mainly fixes login problems by updating to the new del.icio.us API. Delibar, for those scratching your heads, is what I consider the missing link of social bookmarking which actually makes your 'marks useful; it's a menubar item that provides access to all your del.icio.us bookmarks, even storing them in a folder hierarchy (the first tag is the main folder, second tag is a subfolder) and displaying tag bundles you create at the site. It's an indispensable utility in my arsenal, and if you've been having login issues like I have (Quicksilver's del.icio.us plugin can't seem to login anymore either), this 0.8.2 update should fix your issues.Delibar is donationware and available from Whamoo.
