Jerry Krinock wrote on Mar 7^th, 2012 at 2:08am:


nada.  I'm happy as it is.

Thanks.

Jerry,

I'm not seeing any success stories here.  Only repeating problems that are either new to you, or you are in the process of fixing.

After almost 50 years in IT, I think I'm qualified to state that the product isn't stable enough for general release.

I could be wrong.  But I'm going to need yo hear people posting that things are going fine and that you can afford to let the system sit, hands-off, for a week or two before attempting to implement this.

Are you sure there's no way to upgrade bookdog?

Hello, Mark.   Thank you for your persistence with BookMacster.  I can answer each of these topics

Bookdog.  Although I appreciate your fondness for Bookdog, actually, Bookdog can only sync, or as it's called in Bookdog, migrate two browsers at a time, and only do it manually, and cannot sync to another Mac over the internet, only over a local area network.  We did publish an AppleScript which could sync three browsers by doing three migrations, and this could be scheduled to run daily, or whatever, with Automator, but that's way over most users' heads and very few ever tried it.

7 minutes to finish processing.  This is not a bug, it's a feature!  The reason is that bookmarks syncing or alphabetizing is, we hope, one of the least important jobs your Mac has to do; therefore we want to minimize BookMacster's resource usage.  The first way we do this is by recognizing that, when you add a bookmark, there's a good chance that you're going to add another bookmark or two within the next few minutes.  So BookMacster's Worker waits 4-5 minutes after the first change is detected before processing it, so that these several changes can be processed at once.  Some more tens of seconds elapse while BookMacster's background Worker waits to make sure that Dropbox or iCloud are not syncing your bookmarks.  Finally, the Worker runs as nicely as possible (with a Unix nice value of +20), yielding to any other process which calls itself more important.  So we call it 7 minutes to be safe.

Now you still might ask why can't BookMacster do this manually, cutting out the 5 minutes and running as a regular priority process.  It can, but it takes two clicks in the menu: Bookmarkshelf ▸ Import followed by  Bookmarkshelf ▸ Export.  This is kind of a feature too – it's one way of encouraging users to glance at that Content between the Import and Export operations.  Is this what you really want in all of your browsers?  We're probably going to add a one-click manual Sync button in a future release, and this is already available to power users (the Perform… button in the Agents ▸ Advanced tab), but with power comes danger.

There is a hidden preference to reduce the 5 minutes to 1 minute.  See sec. 5.6 of the Help Book.  We use it for testing but do not recommend it.

Type 3 User.  I think you mean Usage Style 3, called Using BookMacster Directly.  I recommend this style and use it myself when I'm not testing BookMacster, which is, unfortunately, not very often.  Using BookMacster Directly means that you add bookmarks to and visit bookmarks from BookMacster directly.  You do not activate any Agents, never sync and never even export, because you no longer use the Bookmarks menus in their web browser.  Using BookMacster Directly is conceptually simpler because there is less interaction with web browsers.

I have a Mac Pro, a MacBook Pro and an iPodTouch.  The Safari bookmarks should be identical on all 3 devices.  Actually, then, you need Syncing, which is Usage Style 2.  This is particularly true because of the iPod Touch – Apple has walled off access to Safari bookmarks on iOS devices, and the only way to get in is to sync with Safari on the Mac.

I need to do a housecleaning on the desktop and laptop.  I agree.  Since BookMacster has "trashed" your bookmarks before, the first thing you should do is to delete any existing .bkmslf documents which might still be operational.  Please follow these instructions:

http://www.sheepsystems.com/files/support_articles/bookmacster-start-over.html

(In the next version, we may add a menu item to do that with one click.)

I'd like to use the desktop as the initial source of the bookmarks.  Good; starting out with one set of bookmarks makes things much easier.

• Do the Starting Over procedure described above, on both Macs.
• Make sure that both Macs have BookMacster 1.10 or later.  Use Check for Update.
• You'll need a Dropbox (or similar) account on both Macs.  iCloud is not similar and MobileMe is going away.
• If you have MobileMe or iCloud activated on either Mac, check their System Preference panels and switch off Bookmarks syncing for now.

• Activate BookMacster on your Mac Pro.
• Click in the menu: File ▸ New Bookmarkshelf.
• During the wizard, select Safari only.  (You didn't mention any other browsers.)
• Click Do It! when asked if Import now.
• When asked about "other Macs", click Move, and move the new .bkmslf file into your Dropbox folder.
• Do any sorting, find/delete duplicates, verify, or other reorganization as desired.
• Click the Sync button in the toolbar (new in BookMacster 1.10).
• Switch on checkboxes 1, 3 and 4 as shown here (2, Sort is optional), and Export when prompted.



• Quit BookMacster.

• Activate your MacBook Pro.
• Open a Finder window to your Dropbox folder.
• Wait for Dropbox to drop the .bkmslf file from your Mac Pro.
• Doubleclick it, to open in BookMacster.
• Click the tab: Settings ▸ Clients.
• Add "Safari" as a Client
• Click the Sync button in the toolbar, add Agents, and Export as did on your Mac Pro.

If you want automatic syncing of Safari bookmarks to your iPod Touch via MobileMe or iCloud, switch on Bookmarks syncing in their System Preference panel, on one Mac only.  Because of Apple's one-checkbox simplicity, this may result in additional bookmarks being imported from your iPod Touch.  Launch BookMacster on the synced Mac after 20 minutes, and check.  Delete any unwanted bookmarks and then click in the menu: Bookmarkshelf ▸ Export.

For everyday syncing, BookMacster Agents will operate in the background and you should not need to launch BookMacster.

Again, thank you for your persistence, and let us know if you have any trouble.  We're working on making BookMacster easier to use and your feedback is helpful.