As I said many times, I believe Delicious bookmarks are the best way to save, archive and organize the web pages you save for future reference. I also wrote a roundup about the 7 best Mac apps that brings delicious.com to your desktop, be sure to read it if you missed.
As you can see from the roundup, Delibar was in. I’ve been a beta tester of this app for a few months, and now that it has gone public I can finally review it.
First, Delibar is a menubar app. Once you’ve downloaded it you’ll be asked to fill your delicious credentials so that the app can retrieve your stored bookmarks. Then, you’ll be ready to use it.
With just one click on the menubar icon Delibar will show up in all its awesomeness. The first thing you’ll notice it’s the interface: it’s gorgeous, seems like a more consistent HUD interface and Shiny Frog has done an excellent job in providing such a beatiful UI but - most of all - Delibar makes easy to perform many actions with just a few clicks.
And that’s a big achievement today.
Anyway, there are four main tabs: Bookmarks, Recent, Network and Saved. Bookmarks and Recent are pretty much self explanatory: they’ll let you search inside your whole list of bookmarks and display / search your most recent bookmarked pages. By default, the Bookmarks tab looks like this:
And here’s how it looks when searching something:
Let’s move to the Network tab, where things become really interesting. Here, you’ll see all the newest bookmarks from the people you added to your delicious network: the network refreshing time is adjustable in the app’s Preferences, you can choose to refresh the list every 30 minutes, 1 Hour, 4 Hours, 8 Hours and Once a day.
Moreover, Delibar supports Growl notifications: everytime someone in your network will add a new bookmark, you’ll get notified by Delibar about it. Last, a badge will inform you about how many unread network bookmarks you have in your “inbox”.
Very useful.
Now, you should know that Delibar comes in to versions, a Free and a Pro one. The free version has one only active feature: search. On the other hand, the Pro version (which you can purchase at 18 Euros) allows you to share, discover and manage bookmarks. The sharing options include Twitter, bit.ly and Facebook accounts which you have to authorize in the Preferences.
Once set up, you can click on the sharing icon inside each bookmark and here you go:
You can even share bookmarks via email or send them to MarsEdit. Here’s one feature I’d like to see in the future update: integration with many other 3rd party apps like Tweetie, Twitterrific and Yojimbo. Hope the developers will listen.
By now, the tweeting process is very simple, you click on the bird and Delibar returns you a shortened link which is automatically posted on Twitter.
Last, you can manage bookmarks with Delibar. Besides the obvious add / delete functions, I’d like to focus on the bookmarklets.
There are two kinds of bookmarklets: Send to Delibar and Quick Add. The quick add one simply posts the page to your delicious account but I suggest you to use the first, more complete one. Indeed, with Send to Delibar bookmarklet every selection you make on a page will be added as a description. See the screenshot below.
I’ve only scratched the surface of Delibar’s potentialities with this review. The ways this app can speed up your workflow are really endless, especially if the devs will implement new features with the next releases and if you usually save a lot of pages everyday.
By now,one things is for sure: Delibar is the most powerful, yet easiest tool to manage your delicious bookmarks.
And that’s enough.
