Indeed, the procedure outlined by Leo works, although as you can see it takes quite a few manualsteps.  BookMacster 1.1 will do this automatically.

Leo of BORG wrote on Jul 16^th, 2010 at 1:20am:
Note that Mirror-Open is checked ON, so that Import occurs automatically.

Leo of BORG wrote on Jul 16^th, 2010 at 1:20am:
Actually, it's worse than that.  Because BookMacster 1.0.3 writes some small data to the Bookmarkshelf after a change, this would trigger Dropbox to update the other end, and then the same thing happens there, and you end up with constant and infinite loop of changes, even if you don't change any bookmarks.  BookMacster 1.0.3 + Agents are simply not compatible with Dropbox.  Upcoming BookMacster 1.1 has this issue fixed.

Cool! Thanks for the heads up.

K

+1 wanting to know a strategy for syncing multiple macs.

k

Hello daadma,

I was hoping maybe a real user would chime in, but I believe you are asking a question that no one has a definitive answer to.  So, here's the quick view from the lab.

Dropbox by itself may be good for syncing Safari bookmarks among computers, but not among browsers, if someday they fulfill their stated plans to allow items outside of your designated Dropbox folder to be synced.  You could simply sync your Safari bookmarks file, ~/Library/Safari/Bookmarks.plist.  However, if you tried this with other browsers you'd either lose bookmarks occasionally, or in the case of Firefox, corrupt the file or crash the browsers.  This is because other browsers don't allow you to mess with their bookmarks file while they are running.

Google Bookmarks is OK if you want to use the Google Bookmarks GUI to access your bookmarks.

I've tested Xmarks (formerly Foxmarks) for a couple of Bookdog users who thought there might be a conflict between Xmarks and Bookdog when Xmarks did weird things.  But we couldn't find any conflict.  As far as I could see, in theory and in practice, there was no conflict between Xmarks vs. Bookdog and Bookwatchdog.  BookMacster does the same stuff as far as bookmarks files are concerned, so the story with BookMacster should be the same.  In my brief testing, Xmarks did its limited job of synchronizing Safari and Firefox bookmarks across Macs with no trouble.

Finally, one user mentioned (I believed in the list archives) putting a BookMacster Bookmarkshelf file into a Dropbox and reported that it worked, as it should.  You'd have to manually read in the new Bookmarkshelf after a drop had occurred, for example, whenever you had modified the Bookmarkshelf on one Mac and then moved to your other Mac, and then, if desired, export to your browsers.  This is do-able for a disciplined user, and a moderately adept user who would also probably include it as part of their Mac-login AppleScript.  (BookMacster supports a 'perform agent' AppleScript command.)

We'd been planning on adding a Trigger to BookMacster agents which could trigger an export whenever an external app (Dropbox) dropped an updated Bookmarkshelf" as an Agent trigger.  That would make this scheme a little easier to do and more reliable.  But then yesterday after giving this from thought I instead started working on a much nicer "Keep synced to other other Macs on my Dropbox account" checkbox.  This would be much easier and also more efficient, since instead of sending the whole .bkmslf file any time a change was made, for small changes it would send only little messages via Dropbox encapsulating the changes.

So I'm going to get back to work on that now.  I'll post here if I get to a "milestone" one way or the other.  Thanks for the feedback.