November 25, 2009

The developer of iBookmarks, Guy Gubi, was kind enough to offer me a promo code, so I’ve been giving it a test drive.

I have to admit, I really don’t use my iPhone all that much for web browsing. Sites that are handheld optimized are stark, and full sites are just too…big. Nonetheless, there are sites I go to, and times I need to visit my usual sites on my iPhone. I have a few bookmarks in my Mobile Safari, and those have always been adequate. Then again, if I were a big MS user, the list of bookmarks would probably bother me, as I organize them on my desktop into nice neat little folders.

This is where iBookmarks makes the difference. Not only can you save your bookmarks, but you can sort them by category.  This is far closer to the desktop experience than what we get with MS. The only disappointment here (courtesy of Apple, of course), is that you have to leave MS and return to iBookmarks to either add a new bookmark (which you can do from copy/paste), or go to another saved website.

iBookmark installs with a few presets, but you can delete what’s there, or simply add to them if you’re happy with the categories. You can rename categories (just as you would from your desktop), or create new ones. As you can see from this screenie at the left, I have created a category that basically includes the pages in my home tabs on my desktop.

I really like the way the site icon shows with the bookmark name, if it’s available. I’m not sure why they don’t show up on every site I use though, since they all have them.

Saving the url is simple. You can name them whatever you want (notice I use TiPB for The iPhone Blog), and then either type in the url, or paste. I highly recommend pasting in the url. My one complaint about iBookmarks is it’s unforgiving. You can’t edit a bookmark. If you type “blig” instead of “blog” and save…you will have to delete that bookmark and start all over.

And while you can re-order your bookmarks, you can’t move them from one category to another. If you decide later that you want a category with only reference bookmarks, you will have to re-create that dictionary entry in that category and then delete it in the reference category.   It would have been nice to be able to edit both the bookmarks, and their category placement. Perhaps we’ll see that in a version in the future.

One unique feature of iBookmarks is the statistics view. In this view you can see the five sites you’ve visited most often (launched from iBookmarks), and the percentage in comparison.

While I don’t do enough iPhone web browsing for this to make a tremendous difference in my personal browsing habits, I can definitely see how it could simplify things for those who do.

iBookmarks is available in the iTunes store for $.99. I also enjoy Guy Gubi’s other iPhone app, iFavorites.    

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