Q. I am using Smarky, Synkmark or BookMacster for syncing. I switch Syncing on and then quit Smarky, Synkmark or BookMacster. The app's Agent works silently in the background to keep my bookmarks synced. But once a week, or once a month I go through my bookmarks and reorganize: Move new bookmarks into proper folders, delete those which proved to be not useful, etc. Before I started using Smarky, Synkmark or BookMacster, I did this in a browser such as Firefox, Safari, etc. Can I still do that?A. You can if you really want to, but we recommend instead doing such housecleaning in Smarky, Synkmark or BookMacster. Here is why:
• Our apps have a
Safe Sync Limit feature which is set by default to 25 changes. That is, if you try to make more than 25 changes during the sync window period which is by default 5 minutes, our app will display a warning and stop syncing. This is to prevent some glitch in one browser from ruining the bookmarks in all of your browsers. To allow you to do major bookmarks housecleaning in the browser, you must change the limit from 25 to a large number, which effectively disables this safety feature.
• All the time you are doing your housecleaning, our app's background Agents will be constantly getting notifications that you've changed your bookmarks, so every few minutes it will ask the browser for your bookmarks to see if there are changes, then a few minutes later attempt to sync, but then abort when it sees that you made even more changes. Firefox, Opera and Chrome provide the bookmarks to us via JavaScript browser extensions which are not very efficient. Oh, and at the same time, the browser may be pushing your changes to the cloud. And you may be changing your mind as you go along – delete this folder, no bring it back, … . Theoretically, everything should work, but it puts the browser, the cloud, and our app under a lot of stress. You could see spinning color wheels at best, some error indications or data loss at worst. Think of a preschool administrator trying to do a head-count of children as they run around a playground. It is much easier during nap time.
• The user interface in our apps is a macOS native outline/table view, and it has many tools to move, copy, find duplicates, sort, find and replace text, verify bookmarks, control-click contextual menu, everything that we've imagined in 10 years. In addition to lacking these tools, Firefox
Show All Bookmarks works like a Microsoft Windows app, and Chrome's
Bookmark Manager is even more annoying – it is in a fact a web page.
• At this time, we don't have the App Update mechanism working in the background, so it is good to launch our app at least once in a while so it can check for updates.