WebnoteHappier

The newest addition to my regularly used applications is the cheerily named WebnoteHappy. This fresh indie Mac app is a bookmark manager with excellent del.icio.us integration. I’m excited to talk about it partly because it integrates some key features I hoped for in a del.icio.us client after discovering Cocoalicious.

These features are far too sensible and obvious for me to attempt to take any credit for them, regardless if you are a Mac user with too many bookmarks I highly recommend you check this application out.

My last rant on the subject of a dream del.icio.us client concluded with a musing on how I would like to see a tag browsing interface used as an aid for assigning tags, rather than just browsing. After using happily bookmarking with WebnoteHappy for a couple of weeks I had an idea of how that could possibly be done.

In a nutshell I’d like to see the tag browser and webnote listing to update as I edit the tags for a given bookmark. The purpose being to provide valuable information that is likely to influence my selection of tags:

• Which other bookmarks (if any) share the same tags as the bookmark I’m editing?
• What other tags have I already assigned to potentially related bookmarks?

Some will disregard these concerns as problems with categories not tags. Personally I’d like to know how unique my tagging of a particular website is. Tags becomes less useful as a tool for filtering my links if I have hundreds of sites tagged with the same tags. Similarly, if I fail to tag two sites of related subject matter with common tags, my tags will be not be useful for grouping my links. The current official browser based pop-up window for posting to del.icio.us does this to a degree by suggesting the most popular tags for a given link that is already in the database. What I’m suggesting doesn’t leverage the power of the ‘group mind’, but it ought to provide another valuable context – my existing collection of links and tags.

I’ve attempted to demonstrate this idea with a series screenshots of WebnoteHappy. I made a few clicks between each frame to roughly replicate what I envisage happening automatically. Check out WebnoteHappier. If there are any del.icio.us posting interfaces out there that already do this I’d love to hear about them!