This morning, I published 10 Great Mac Bookmarking Apps and Services: How They Compare.
I’m eager to hear what are your your favorite bookmarking tools for the Mac?
I moved from Raindrop to Anybox a few years ago. I like Raindrop, but did not like that it was dependent on being online. Anybox gives me control. I experience the developers as being responsive when I reported a bug or asked a question. It serves my purpose and I also like that I can easily use it on my iPad and my iPhone. And I also like that I can put files there. I don’t do this often, but I do sometimes use it. And thank you for the fact that Hookmark works well with Anybox.
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I still use Raindrop due to the API and its cached archiving. I use it as a Read it later service too, as IFTTT watches my X/Reddit bookmarks and likes.
I would prefer a quicker offline mode though!
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I would ask Raindrop users to please contact its developer to encourage him to make his app link-friendly. Ironically for a bookmarking app, it still isn’t in the sense that it lacks an API for linking:
@LucB, I’d be curious to know what your current bookmarking / read it later / rss system entails. Are you willing to share that?
A quick response in a nutshell:
Hookmark (for macOS and Pal) is now my main bookmarking tool. I still maintain a legacy Pinboard account because it archives pages for full-text search. And I have configured Hookmark to sync new stuff to Pinboard so it’s effortless to add content there except from iPhone (that will be supported later).
I don’t use Pinboard very much, however, now that I have Hookmark. Like many others, I’m disappointed by the fact that Pinboard has not been improved in years, and the developer is not responsive.
When (soon) Hookmark will support import/export of bookmarks from other software, I plan to export all my Pinboard bookmarks and import them into Hookmark.
For “read-it-later”, I use several Hookmark tags that are prefixed with “!”. That is syntax from “PRS” (Footnotes 1-3 below). They are:
- “!delve” (meaning read carefully)
- “!watch” (for videos)
- “!read” (reading generically)
- “!re-read”
Note that I also have “!” tags for other actions, such as “!buy”. Using tags is much more general than using the “read-later” flag.
I periodically review stuff tagged with “!”. (There are other actions, such as “!buy”).
I use Pins app on iPhone when I want a bookmark to land into Pinboard because Hookmark does not yet sync to Pinboard from iPhone. We plan to support that – user feedback will determine its priority.
Per the original post up there, there are many options that have emerged since Cognitive Productivity with macOS: 7 Principles for Getting Smarter with Knowledge was last revised.
RSS
I use Feedly for aggregating feeds. I use this mainly from my mobile device. I use my mobile device mainly for taking-in information and productive practice (described in my two Cognitive Productivity books, Anki flashcard practicing on steroids).
I rarely use an RSS app on my Mac, but when I do, I use Readkit, which is link-friendly unlike one of its competitors whose name escapes me now.
bookmarking enhancements coming to Hookmark
In subsequent releases of Hookmark we will have deeper integration with Pinboard and other bookmarking services. We will also have enhanced tagging in Hookmark, such as syncing tags to Pinboard.
Footnotes
- Georgeff, M. P., & Lansky, A. L. (1986). Procedural Knowledge. Proceedings of the IEEE: Special issue on knowledge representation, 14(10), 1383-1398.
- Georgeff, M. P., & Lansky, A. L. (1987). Reactive reasoning and planning. In Proceedings of the Sixth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2 (pp. 677-682). Seattle, WA: AAAI
- Georgeff, M. P., Lansky, A. L., & schoppers, M. (190/). Reasoning and planning in dynamic domains: An experiment with a mobile robot (Technical Note No. 380). Artificial Intelligence Center, SRI International, Menlo Park, CA.
Those references can be found in my Ph.D. thesis, Goal Processing in Autonomous Agents .
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Very interesting and useful information. The main way I use Hookmark right now is copying links to emails, folders or Apple notes and pasting them into the notes of a task in Omnifocus. So when I see my Bookmarks menu, it’s got lots of stuff in it. If I were to use it for general bookmarking, I feel like my list would be cluttered with these bookmarks along with things I’m just linking together…
Another issue is some of my bookmarks in there I think are from a while back when first playing with Hookmark. So I’m not sure how many of those links I really need. I don’t see a good way to tell where something might be linked from and if I still need it. Part of me is just thinking about starting from scratch and clearing my database, now that I want to focus on getting maximum usefulness out of Hookmark. I don’t have too many links.
I just bought Goodlinks because I like the idea of using it with Hookmark to backup the full web pages I bookmark, plus it seems like it would be a nice client on my iPad for “read later” stuff.
Thank you for responding and the useful info!
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So I’ve been on a deep dive for the last couple weeks trying to figure out a bookmarking application that would really work for me. I finally realized that a lot of the stuff I want to bookmark, I need to have a nice preview image of the thing I booked marked that I can review easily.
Recipes I “might” want to cook (not worth putting in my main recipe app yet), things I want to 3d print, restaurants I want to try, things I want to buy, apps I want to checkout, books I want to read…a lot of “Someday/Maybe” stuff in GTD parlance. All of these benefit by having a photo to show me the item when I’m reviewing them to see if I want to move on them or not.
Once I realized I really needed this, it came down to Raindrop.io and a self hosted similar project called Karakeep. I ended up going with Karakeep since it was open source and I could host it on my own server. I tried Anybox and Goodlinks since they were nice Mac apps with lots of shortcuts and things, but I just couldn’t make them work for what I wanted. Karakeep even has a reading view so I can view the articles I want to read without all the distractions. I also have it downloading the full archive of the page to prevent link rot.
There are some downsides. Karakeep doesn’t even have a Mac app, or a proper desktop Safari extension right now (just one made by someone in the community), so that part isn’t great. I made it an app in my dock using MacOS Sequoia “Add To Dock” feature. The browsing on iOS and iPadOS shows only one column at a time instead of a grid of 2 or 4 columns which I don’t like. But I know it’s under heavy development by multiple people, so it’s always improving.
How have you decided what services you spend time adding to the Services window in Hookmark? I’d love for Karakeep to be there like “linkding”, so that anything I bookmark in Hookmark would automatically get added to Karakeep (and downloaded for safe keeping). They have an API already to integrate with. Karakeep API
