MacCritic

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Favorite quotation: Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes, that way when you criticize them, you're a mile away and you have their shoes. - Jack Handey

Thursday, January 31, 2013

Suggestions for Safari

Suggestions for Safari

Overhaul to Bookmarks:

Simplify

There's a "Bookmarks Menu," "Bookmarks Bar," and just "Bookmarks." This feels overly complex, first of all. Half the time I'm in a hurry and my bookmark ends up in the wrong one of these three. Even if it's in the correct spot it's impossible to find because it goes to the very end of the list. The Bookmarks bar goes off the screen anyway with its little >> menu, which is silly; it should make multiple rows of bookmarks instead of doing this (alá Camino).

iBookmarks

Speaking of that bookmarks list, it needs to be greatly enhanced in terms of sort options. It ought to be sortable according to the date the bookmark was added. It would also be nice to sort bookmarks by frequency visited, rating, and any other metadata I want to give them—make Safari's bookmarks essentially into an "iPhoto" or "iTunes" but for bookmarks instead of photos or songs. For any bookmark I'd like to know when I last visited it and possibly even when all the different times were that I visited it.

Social Media & Blog Integration

If a bookmark has been shared on a social media site or blogged about, etc., then your Safari bookmark would include a link to the post(s) in question. Safari would also let you see a "smart bookmarks folder" for each social media site, letting you actually view all bookmarks you've shared or that have been shared with you (sortable by friend, by date, by category, etc.).

Strong History/Auto-bookmarking

I would also like a view that shows me "auto-bookmarks" for all the pages that were open on my browser for a long period of time. The duration could be configurable, so lets say, I set it to one hour. Any tab that's been open for one hour or longer would go into the "auto-bookmarks," which would essentially serve as a "strong history." That way, sites you spent five seconds at would not be in the same list with sites you spent all day at.

Auto-bookmarking would also automatically make a bookmark for any thread that you post on, in any forum. Ideally it could even support integration with popular forum platforms to set up some kind of notifications for you when threads you've posted on get responded to, etc. Or at least if that kind of support could be in the form of a plug-in that would be nice.

Self-Organization

It would also be nice if the bookmarks would automatically add themseves into folders that are appropriate to their genre. For example I bookmark a lot of stuff on stackoverflow.com. Anything that I bookmark there should automatically add itself to the previous folder that I added a bookmark from stackoverflow.com to: "Developer." Whereas if I bookmark something on cnn.com it would automatically go into the last bookmarks folder that I put something in from there.

Easier Adding

Adding a bookmark is currently annoying. I have to say "add bookmark," then scroll through a four-page-long list of all the various folders. The entire hierarchical view of folders is expanded out, so to find one of the main folders that's last in the list, I have to scroll past every sub-folder of the main folders that precedes it (and there are tons of them). This is incredibly kludgy.

Instead when you click "add bookmark," I envision a pop-up view that appears which would look just like the "Downloads" folder does when it pops up off of the dock. So to see inside a folder click the folder and it pops into that folder, then hit "Add" to add it in the currently viewed folder. You would also see the other bookmarks that are in that folder during this process so you would know if you were adding the site in with other similar ones, in case you couldn't remember which folder you were putting those kind of bookmarks in. It