IOS – How to sync bookmarks across i-devices and the web

bookmarksiosmac

I've never liked Evernote so much. Now (Mountain Lion) that Notes and ToDo lists are synched among devices via iCloud, I can finally leave it and just find a good application to manage my bookmarks.

I have tons of them, mostly in Delicious. I've tried a couple of desktop clients, like Delish and Delibar, but they don't really work well for me. Delibar, while cool-looking, is nothing about managing bookmarks, just consuming them. Delish is better, but why can't I select multiple bookmarks, drag them onto a tag to add them to it, just open the bookmark without having to right click on it…

How do you manage your bookmarks so that you can arrange and fully-organize them on the desktop while still being able to access them on the web and from your i-devices? Thanks

Best Answer

It seems to me like you're looking for the exact kind of solution that I am... and I have yet to find anything that exactly fits the bill. Safari can sync bookmarks through iCloud, of course, but it's severely lacking in other functionality. Yojimbo is a great Mac app for managing bookmarks (among other types of data) but doesn't have any great iOS companion (they have a buggy, read-only iPad app, and also the ability to create a read-only web-based version of your library). I'm hopeful that Yojimbo 4.0 (which should be coming very soon) will improve this, but I'm certainly not holding my breath.

In the meantime, I've found some of the web-based bookmark managing solutions to be the best. Both Pinboard and Kippt work great (I've been using both for different sorts of bookmarks). Pinboard charges a sign-up fee but is fantastic & very actively being developed. The biggest difference between the two is that in Pinboard you manage bookmarks via tags (much like Delicious) whereas in Kippt you create groups/folders of bookmarks. The cool thing, though, is that both of these services are supported by a fantastic Safari extension called Cloudmarks that will let you easily search through your bookmarks or add a new bookmark to either of these services. While not exactly a native Mac app, it does make it really fast to find the bookmark you're looking for. Also, on iOS, there are several apps that sync with Pinboard and at least one that works with Kippt (hopefully more soon since they only very recently opened up their API).