I just got around to trying the latest beta, and everything seems to work great now! Thanks for all your hard work on squashing those bugs. The screencast was also very informative. A quick suggestion: I'd like to see a preference option in Bookmacster to not export Glims-style separators to Safari if Glims is installed. The reason: While I like seeing the separators in Safari with Glims, they clutter up the interface too much on iPhone Safari (since the bookmarks are synced).

Jaws wrote on Dec 3^rd, 2009 at 10:33pm:


Yes, we found a couple other bugs.  Camino separators are a bit of a pain because the Camino app doesn't think they're important enough to endow them with unique identifiers.  But we invented a workaround for that yesterday.  Stay tuned for another day or so, and you'll have BookMacster 0.6.0, and a screencast demonstrating your workflow.  We're testing for all the issues you reported.

Thank for the re-test, Jaws.  I retested this yesterday after reading your message, and the separators came through OK for me.  I started to make a screencast of this in action so you can compare it with what you've seen, but then discovered another bug, probably unrelated, but am working on that first.  Will be back with an answer soon.

I just re-tested this.  While testing, I discovered two other issues.  Let me digress on those first.

Issue 1.  Re-reading one of your previous messages, this time I noted your explanation that when a new user does a Import from Bookdog with option "Combine", there may be lots of unexpected duplicate bookmarks which must be manually fixed.  Probably we should an extra question to the Import from Bookdog wizard, or maybe delete duplicates by default.  But then there's also the issue that the user has no way to specify the order of importing.  A little messy.

Issue 2.  In my previous message, the "both at once" method doesn't work because you want Clean Slate on during the Camino import (to get the separators) and off during the Safari import (to not wipe out the separators).  Unfortunately, and I was trying to avoid this, it looks like we need to have a Clean Slate checkbox in every row.  Arghh.  Looks like the Special Mapping checkbox needs to be sacrificed to make room, because that thing already has too damned many checkboxes.

Now, regarding those separators, yes upon more careful retesting I find it worked for me two days ago because I just so happened to test with separators among folders.  But when I test with separators among bookmarks, they all float to the top as you say.

Well, back to work – See ya in another day or two.  Maybe three because I'm riding my bike over to Apple in Cupertino to update my Mac Mini's main partition to Snow Leopard this morning.  Fighting with Earthlink ADSL to get a 5 GB download would definitely ruin my day, but 20 miles of bicycling will do the opposite 

Thanks for your persistence, Jaws.

This will work properly in the next release, version 0.1.7.  That is, importing from Safari will not cause separators previously imported from Camino to move to the top or bottom.

There are two ways to do these imports.  The first way is to start with an empty document (Bookmarkshelf ▸ Delete All Content if needed), list both Camino and Safari (in that order) in Import Clients, check both of their boxes, and click Import.  The second way is to activate one at a time and do two Imports, Camino first and Safari second.

Either way, during the Safari import, the Import's Clean Slate must be off.  This is per documentation – either source or destination separators are retained in accordance with Clean Slate.

One unfortunate thing I noticed about Camino while testing this is that Camino does not attach identifiers to its separators.  Therefore, if you import from a Camino document containing, say, 5 separators, with Clean Slate off, and then re-import without making any changes, the Status Bar will indicate 5 additions, 5 deletions and a number of changes.  The additions and deletions are because the 5 unidentified separators are not matched, but are instead deleted and replaced by new separators.  The changes are probably due to the positions of the surrounding items being changed as the separators are removed and then added back in.  I added this to the bug tracker and we'll see if we can think of a workaround one of these days.

Thanks! The duplication issue seems fixed with the latest build, but all separators get moved to the top of each folder after syncing with Safari. I have tried this with sorting off, and get the same result.

Thanks for your response! Yes, that is what I'm looking to do. Although, it seems as though there are quite a few extra steps there that could complicate things for new users. I, for one, would probably not start out Camino only with "clean slate" before adding in Safari import. Especially because on initial setup, Bookmacster asks what browser you want to import, and if a user wants to import two, they are probably going to select the two. Also, there is no option in the initial setup to select "clean slate," so new users will have to go back after that initial import and "delete all content," select "clean slate," and reimport the Camino bookmarks. It seems a little unintuitive with a lot of extra steps there.

In practice, there does appear to be some bugs. When running the "maintenance workflow," all of my bookmarks were duplicated and the separators got wonky (some disappeared, some moved locations).