How many hours have you ever spent looking for that tutorial you know you have bookmarked three months ago?
A lot, I guess. Well, this is beacuse bookmarks have become too important, they’re the only way we can store websites permanently (I mean, we can’t leave open tabs for 200 websites) being sure that we’ll “find that tutorial” again in the future.
What if we can store all of our boomarked websites in a single desktop application?
Let’s talk about Webbla.
“If you like to handle your music and photos with iTunes and iPhoto, Webbla is the right application to handle your bookmarks.”
These are the words that Webbla’s developers choose to display in their application homepage, and they’re absolutely right.
Basically, Webbla is an application that helps you in organizing your bookmarks,visually. You can either export your bookmarks from your default browser or save them to Webbla through a very useful bookmarklet.
Moreover,it also offers you an easy way to keep track of website updates through single websites settings.
From a user interface standpoint, Webbla is nothing more than iTunes applied to web pages instead of albums: alike to Apple’s music player, you can decide to display your bookmarks through a simple list view or through a more visually appealing grid system; once you’ve decided how to display them it’s time to proceed to the next step, tags.
You can assign as many tags as you wish, then you can browse by tags through the beautiful “tag tree” displayed above; you can also enter a custom title or a custom description in order to remember easily the page you saved. Then, if you type Cmd+F (find shortcut) you can search your websites through tags, title, description,content..anything you want.
But the most important feature are Smart Collections: as you can see in the image below, Smart Collection really come in handy when you want to sort your bookmarks in a “smart way”, filtering your pages basing on the rules you entered. (and you can enter more than one, if you want)
Press Return to open the selected bookmarks in your default web browser;
Define your own shortcuts to add bookmarks from your web browser to Webbla;
Webbla supports Spotlight, Cover Flow and Quick Look, so you can easily find and preview your bookmarks with the Finder:
If you are using CMS or blogging applications like Joomla or WordPress on your own website, Webbla can give you a great overview of all your favorite themes;
If you are a web designer, you can catalog your work for presentation in an elegant way;
Define a Smart Folder of Kind is (other) “Safari bookmark” in Finder and add it to the Sidebar so you can Quick Look your bookmarks or visit them with Cover Flow.
⌘N ➜ New Bookmark
⇧⌘N ➜ New Collection
⌥⌘N ➜ New Smart Collection
⌦ ➜ Delete Bookmark
⌥⌦ ➜ Delete Bookmark
⏎ ➜ Open In Web browser
⌥⌘1➜ List View
⌥⌘2 ➜ Icon View
⌥⌘C ➜ Copy Thumbnail
Despite its huge potential (Webbla is here in my dock since two weeks now) there are a few issues to mention: for example, when you add a bookmark from Firefox bookmarklet button the page is sometimes exported to Webbla without refreshing it so that there’s no thumbnail and you have to go searching for it manually. There are other minor drawbacks as well, the lack of a dock badge for unread pages is one of those, but I think they will be solved with future updates.
Webbla is a great app, it could become your time saver if you spend many time managing your bookmarks and you just can’t stand Firefox/ Safari bookmarks manager, Deliciousor other social bookmarking sites.
A single user license is available at € 16,48. Go download.
