09th May 2003
Bookmark A Go-Go
Hi, I’m Daniel, and I use the Safari Browser on my Mac,
and we’re not.. snif!.. .we’re not seeing eye to eye…
(Room full of fellow Safari whingers: “hi Daniel”…)
Has this happened to you? You’re looking at a few web sites,
and you see some things that you want to come back to later,
but you really want to focus at the moment. You don’t want
to start opening a bunch of other windows or tabs. You
don’t have an 8000×4000 pixel monitor to take in everything
that strikes your fancy.
So, you want to save a bookmark, but you don’t want to get all
bogged down with flipping to the Safari “looks like iTunes,
only less functional” screen.
So you drop the bookmark into the most likely category heading
off of your Bookmarks bar, and promise yourself you’ll
come back to it later and really place it in a nice
subcategory where it will be right at home and easy to find.
Something like: Barrels / Mammals / Monkeys.
Repeat this 50 times. After all, you’re really focused,
and you’re gung-ho about the “I’ll come back to it” idea.
Now go to your formerly orderly categories. What a mess!
How did this happen? It’s as if the Bookmarks threw themselves
a party. The Semantic Web
bookmarks are hanging out with a CSS positioning tutorial,
and there’s The Apache Rewriting guide, kibbutzing with a Seattle Real Estate site and TheOnion.com, guzzling down beers
from Guinness.ie. They’re all over the place!
Here’s my UI suggestion. Are you listening Apple?
When I drag a bookmark and hover over a category for a second,
open that menu. Let me put that bookmark anywhere in the menu
I want. If I hover over a subcategory for a second, do the
same thing. If I go to the bottom of a menu, have a “Create Folder….”
item, so that I can create a subcategory to put my shiny new
bookmark in.
This should all be pretty simple, right? If I am in the middle
of visiting some sites, I don’t want to tangle with the “Show
all bookmarks.” window. It interrupts the flow of things.
I would just love it if I could squirrel things away quickly, and have menu item positioning and category creation on the fly.
