understood. Good luck finishing and polishing.

Hi Albert, welcome to the boat with the people trying to properly setup BookMacster

Is there any news on 1.1 beta or 1.1 final (read 1.1.1 was in the works). Not meant as a pressure but August is almost over. Any rough timeline? Mid or late Sept?

EDIT: Found the beta. Sry for not looking properly. Jerry, maybe you can setup a sticky for the 1.1 beta? So there would be more people testing it.

For anyone interested, find it here:
   [Editor says: See next message in this thread.]

cheers,
FatalError

Good to hear and I can't wait to test 1.1.

I so have to agree with hc. My feeling is excately the same and I once wrote a similar post.

Jerry, why don't you make a poll on these forums what use case users have when using BookMacster?

- sync between browsers
- only sorting
- ...

My usecase is identical to the one of hc. And I just miserably failed at setting up BM with a new bookmarkshelf.

And I also think I am an experienced mac user. Now think about the "wife-test". Or older people or just avarage users (the people who not read every forum entry and the whole help file). They will delete BM after 1 week of failure.

This is not intended to bitch around but to be constructive criticism.

And I so wish BM would suceed.

Thank for the feedback.

hc wrote on Jun 13^th, 2010 at 3:41pm:
Not quite.  Although I agree with the idea, I'd set your 98% number at only 50%.  There are also 30% who just want to keep bookmarks sorted, 10% who just want a replacement for URL Manager Pro, and the remaining 10% actually need to do fine tuning in the Clients, Structure or Agents tabs, i.e. the Advanced Interface.

Presently, the 30% bookmarks-sorters are the only ones who are spared the agony of the Advanced Interface.  We need to spare the 50% bookmarks-syncers and 10% pure-bookmarkers too.  Here is a screenshot of our prototype non-advanced Agents tab:

      

The first three boxes set up an agent which reacts to changes from the local browsers, and the last box to sync from other Macs via Dropbox.  (There is no option whether or not to reload a Dropbox update to an open .bkmslf file.  It's hard-wired YES.  Learned that from BBEdit.)

And the prototype non-advanced Clients tab will be one or maybe two (separate import and export?) controls as in Address Book.app where you click a "[+]" button to add an item (email address or Client).  Just list your clients.  All options are hard-wired to the most popular values.

hc wrote on Jun 13^th, 2010 at 3:41pm:
Agreed.  You don't see us doing any advertising or promotion beyond our own website yet.

hc wrote on Jun 13^th, 2010 at 3:41pm:
Well, I swim a Masters workout several days a week at the Santa Clara Swim Club.  As I sometimes tell others during the "crunch time" of the main set, "If this was easy, everybody would be here".

hc wrote on Jun 13^th, 2010 at 3:41pm:
Sure, if anyone has any suggestions beyond what I've outlined above, now is a great time.

Thanks to you too, F451.

First, let me say that Jerry (the developer) is a great guy. Bookdog even with its idiosyncrasies and slowness did its job masterfully. It's the only app of its kind. I spread the word about it to everyone, who like me, jumps from browser to browser. With the recommendation was a simple caution to overlook its complexity and just give it a shot.

Sadly, Bookmacster is one of the most regressive steps backwards I've seen in any app. By orders of magnitude. I hate to be so brutally honest. This is coming from someone who respects the effort of the developer, his personalized customer service, and how wonderfully Bookdog did its job.

No software should be this complex and hard to understand. And I'm not a total idiot. I would say I'm an advanced Mac user.

The UI needs the spit and polish of a Mac app. But more importantly, it needs totally rethought. I would say that 98% of us simply want the app to do one thing: keep our bookmarks synced across browsers. If that is the premise of this app, then there's got to be a monumental way to hide all this complexity. We just don't need to see it. It frustrates me, so I can only imagine what it would do to a much wider market base that's been introduced to Apple in the last few years.

I want this app to succeed. I truly do. Once again with Bookmacster, the ability to sync across multiple browsers is the sole domain of this app. But it's just not going to reach adoption like it could without a complete front-end overhaul.

Jerry, reach out to your community and ask us what would make your app a success.