Delibar : Delicious for Mac

October 21, 2009 in Apps, Featured by David John

I have been using Delicious on and off for a few years now. I go through phases of using it every day through to months of not going anywhere near the social bookmarking website. There is no doubt about the fact Delicious is great for discovering new content and retaining a list of the brilliant resources you find as you browse the internet.

Once of the biggest issues that put me off using Delicious was the lack of instant accessibility, having to enter usernames and passwords, having to visit the website to view my bookmarks all made it too much hassle for my lazy web 2.0 lifestyle.

The good news is Shiny Frog software have come up with a great way of integrating your Delicious bookmarks directly with OSX in the form of the aptly titled “Delibar” Delibar is a beautiful application that allows you to work directly with your Delicious account from the comfort of your own desktop.

Once install Delibar places a small icon (first icon on left) along the menubar from which you access all types of links from your account.

1. Getting Started

Delibar comes in two versions. A free version that allows you to Search Delicious and a Pro version at only 18 Euros that offers the ability to search, discover, and manage your Delicious bookmarks.

Download Delibar from the Delibar website and drag it into your main Applications folder.  Now double click it to set up the application on your Mac.

The first step is to set Delibar up with your Delicious Account. Delibar can also handle multiple Delicious accounts.

Next you can customise a number of different Delibar settings including having the application load when you start your Mac.

The power of Delibar doesn’t end here. Finding a good resource on the internet doesn’t have to end with just adding it to your Delicious bookmarks. With Delibar you can also shout out your latest find via Twitter, Bit.ly and Facebook.

Using Delibar

Once you have Delibar setup exactly the way you want we can now get down to actually putting the application to use. Clicking on the little Delibar icon along the top menu bar displays a number of different ways to view and manage your Delicious bookmarks.

The Tab support is fantastic and presents your bookmarks in a considerably more attractive way than on the Delicious website. The application displays links to websites along side their Fav.icon, the screen shots below show my bookmarks and my network bookmarks.

Search

Delibar is like Spotlight for your bookmarks! Just bring up the main window by clicking one of the Delibar icons and start typing: the bookmarks will be filtered by matching url / title / notes / tags with your search.

When you are satisfied by your search, you can open your bookmark by double cliking on it or by selecting and hitting enter, or you can also save the search for a later use.

Share

With Delibar sharing bookmarks with friends is easy: you can send a website to them using Twitter, Facebook, bit.ly or Delicious. How easy is sharing a bookmark? Just select it and press the share button!

You can also Drag’n’Drop the bookmarks from the Delibar window into any other Mac application or browser.

Adding a Bookmark

Delibar is integrated with any Mac browser, so you can add bookmarks to Delicious without effort. Just install the bookmarklets (menu “ Help -> Install Bookmarklets ”) and you are ready to add bookmarks to your Delicious account.

Delibar will fill in you title, url and notes (your current selection inside the page) and will present you with a list of tags suggested by Delicious.

Conclusion

Personally speaking Delibar makes Delicious a usable and valuable resource. The ease of use and slick integration make managing bookmarks a breeze.

To be honest I don’t find the Delicious website that ascetically pleasing but Delibar on the other hand is a beautiful application that is a joy to use, couple this with Growl notifications and you begin to see the power of this handy application.

Delibar is so good it could see the end of my browser based bookmarks and I have a new found excitement for Delicious, anyone out there want to network ?

If you use Delicious we would appreciate it so much if you could add TotalApps to your bookmarks (click here) and while you are at it why not  network with us too (Our Delicious Account).