[scotty]

I've been using Safari since the day the beta was released, and I am very happy with it.

Since Steve Jobs called the bookmark management system awesome and breaktrough (it seems to me as if he and Phil Schiller will say that about almost anything), I've particulary excited to see what the fuzz was about.

While I do agree that the way you add bookmarks in Safari is simple, I'm somewhat disappointed about how un-awesome and small (if any) breaktrough the bookmark management really is.

Here's what I thought he would be presenting:

I thought that they'd taken the very good idea of automated playlists from iTunes and implemented it as an automated bookmark system in Safari.

Every day I type in some URL i know by heart, or I do a dozen searches on Google to get to some page on the Internet I never remember the address to - but still visit on a regular basis. I never bookmark these sites; I don't know why, really, but I guess it's because I'm to lazy to organize them, even though it probably is a bigger job to Google them every day. I guess this makes me the kind of person Steve Jobs said the new bookmark system was made for.

Anyway, it would be a breakthrough if the browser used its history to remember which url's and sites I used most often and make a list of my 50 most visited pages automatically. One could also imagine a rating system so that Safari could generate a "top rated system".

It would be even more amazing if Safari automatically compared the pages I'm surfing against Yahoo's or dmoz.org's directories, so that this my (automated) bookmark list would automatically be categorized and organized.

That was what I for a split-second thought Steve Jobs were talking about.

My question to you is: Wouldn't something like that be cool, or am I the only one who would like these Magic Bookmarks?

[alien]

I like your ideas.

http://www.apple.com/macosx/feedback/

[eevyl]

Well, I like your idea of "smart bookmarks", but also think that you need to try to use the bookmark system as it is today.

I find it a lot more friendly than any other browser system.

And your idea of automatic categorizin with net directories... well I do not like the applications to do a lot of automatic nonsupervised work, and it seems your are being a bit too lazy

[Visnaut]

I respectfully disagree with you, eevyl.

You seem to be contradicting yourself by first stating that you think 'smart bookmarks' would be nice, but then saying that people are being lazy.

I think that browsers (and computers in general, for that matter) should be smart enough to recognize our habits. iTunes can already organize and create playlists with our favorite songs. By extension of your argument, people who use smart playlists are too lazy to drag and drop songs into their own playlists.

As it stands, browser histories and bookmarks are nothing more than static record books, much like MP3 apps were before iTunes. Hopefully Apple will continue to innovate with future versions of its apps to be even more responsive to user's habits.

And to add to scotty's excellent ideas, i would also like to see an iTunes-like search field for the bookmarks panel. It would be awesome if it could not only search bookmarks and history, but also do a text search on pages that are still in the cache.

[scotty]

Originally posted by Visnaut:
And to add to scotty's excellent ideas, i would also like to see an iTunes-like search field for the bookmarks panel. It would be awesome if it could not only search bookmarks and history, but also do a text search on pages that are still in the cache.

You know what, Visnaut? I hadn't even thought about what you're suggesting, but your idea is great!

That function would be the natural extension of the web browser as an information finding tool. I use browsers like this: I look up some information in Apple's Cocoa Documentation. Later I want to find the same information again, but I can't exactly remember where I read it. So there I go wading trough a lots of pages.

If the cache could be used for searching, it would be absolutely amazing --- in the original sense of the word, not the Jobs/Schiller sense ...

[TC]

Originally posted by scotty:
You know what, Visnaut? I hadn't even thought about what you're suggesting, but your idea is great!

That function would be the natural extension of the web browser as an information finding tool. I use browsers like this: I look up some information in Apple's Cocoa Documentation. Later I want to find the same information again, but I can't exactly remember where I read it. So there I go wading trough a lots of pages.

If the cache could be used for searching, it would be absolutely amazing --- in the original sense of the word, not the Jobs/Schiller sense ...

OmniWeb already has the ability to search in cached pages in your history. I think it would be great if we had this in Safari.

I would like the bookmark search to work just like the search in iCal. When you enter search criteria a panel appears with your results.
It would be great if you could choose where you are searching by choosing the bookmark folders on the left hand pane. That way you could easily search just in your history or just in a bookmark folder of your choice. If you selected nothing on the left hand side it would be the same as having everything selected i.e. search everywhere.

[Millennium]

When I was writing Howdah, my Chimera-to-Safari bookmark file converter, I had to learn a lot about how the Bookmarks.plist file works. In the process, because of the way .plist files are made, I learned a lot about how Safari handles bookmarks internally.

It would appear that Safari has an extensible metadata system already in place for bookmarks. Right now, the only thing they use it for is to store when you last visited the site which the bookmark describes. However, it would be very easy to extend this to store other metadata. All they need is to hook a UI up to it; the mechanism to store the metadata is already there.

Metadata is the key to "smark bookmarks" like you describe. iTunes' "smart playlists" work by collecting metadata on your MP3 files, in the form of ID3 tags. Safari doesn't use ID3 tags of course, but they have another system which may be used in the future to create "smart bookmarks" like the ones you describe.

[Simon Mundy]

It'd be also great to have 'watch' collections - a collection that is user-defined that looks for pages with certain criteria (phrase 'ibook' or 'mac os x' appears more than once), then automatically prompts you to add that page as a bookmark to that collection.

Criteria could also include such things as 'META tags include...', 'Description contains...', 'Is not search results page...', 'Does not expire...'. I'm sure people could add to this list.

You would obviously need to fine-tune this concept, but essentially you could use the same method that iTunes uses to automatically create collections.

The method used from Mail.app could also be used to 'train' Safari to watch for certain patterns as well - you can manually set which pages should be added to a collection and why.

It would be one step closer to a browser that steps beyond being merely a code interpreter/display device, and more of a useful interactive tool.

[eevyl]

Originally posted by Visnaut:
I respectfully disagree with you, eevyl.

You seem to be contradicting yourself by first stating that you think 'smart bookmarks' would be nice, but then saying that people are being lazy.

It is a very different thing to tell the computer that you want a "smart bookmark folder", than having the computer automatically categorize the links you visit by looking at a web service directory.

While I like the first , I do not like the second