WebnoteHappy is a desktop bookmark management tool from Happy Apps. Author Luis de la Rosa has focused on making it easy to quickly add bookmarks from any browser, and give them a text note and tags if desired. The application also makes it easy to import and export a variety of formats.

I haven’t used the application with a particularly large set of bookmarks, but everything seems very snappy so far. I imported my Safari bookmarks, for what it’s worth, and it was almost instantaneous with no superfluous UI to slow me down. Searching is very quick and uses a Mail-style filtering and “by what criteria” type of interface. The application also supports “Smart Folders,” again with a very Mail-inspired configuration UI.

I like the notion of an independent desktop application for managing bookmarks. It takes ownership away from browser and online services, putting the user’s archival data in their own hands. With the flexibility to export back to the browser or services, it provides an excellent compromise of full ownership of data, while selectively participating in the social communities that one chooses to.

WebnoteHappy allows user to import from or export to del.icio.us, a popular social bookmarking site. But just like NetNewsWire in its recent 2.1 update, del.icio.us is supported to the exclusion of other services. I would like to see a more generic approach taken to “bookmark sharing” from desktop applications. As users choose from a variety of services for things like blogging, they also may choose from Furl, Digg, reddit, or many other services for their bookmarking needs. At least with WebnoteHappy, the verb is “Share” as opposed to NetNewsWire’s “Post to del.icio.us.” While the latter may be more explicit in the short term, the former leaves hope for future expansion of choices – perhaps even a plugin architecture for user-added sharing support.

AppleScript support is minimal and has some rough edges (in my experiments, I managed to crash WebnoteHappy), but establishes a decent baseline of functionality by exposing the “webnote” data model to scripters who want to examine it. If future releases build upon the existing dictionary to add verbs for things like “sharing” and “tagging,” the application could take on all new levels of functionality. For instance, lets say I want to put a subset of my saved bookmarks onto Del.Icio.Us, I might adopt a system where every such bookmark is tagged as “delicious.” Then I could write a script like this:

tell application "WebnoteHappy"
	set delNotes to every webnote whose tags contains "delicious"
	set newNotes to every webnote of delNotes whose tags does not contain "dpublished"
	share newNotes with bookmark service "Del.Icio.Us"
	add tag "dpublished" to webnotes of newNotes
end tell

Such support would make it easy to periodically update arbitrary bookmarking services as I saw fit.

WebnoteHappy is a great 1.0 release, and embraces many of the design guidelines I like to harp on about (while failing to finish my own personal projects): very minimal preferences, a clearly focused problem domain, easy and intuitive to learn. Check it out!

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