OmniWeb Help

OmniWeb Help : Using Bookmarks & History

Using Bookmarks & History

Bookmarks and History in OmniWeb can be viewed in two different ways: in the browser window, much like a web page, and in a separate window that is dedicated to viewing bookmarks. When opened in the browser window, bookmarks behave like a web page and are included as part of your history so you can use the back and forward buttons to leave and return to bookmarks.

A control in Bookmarks preferences allows you to select whether you prefer bookmarks to open in your browser window or into a new window. Holding down option (⌥) when choosing bookmarks from the menu, the toolbar item, or using the keyboard shortcut will temporarily change the behavior.

History in OmniWeb is displayed as just another part of your bookmarks, and for the most part it behaves much the same way as well.


The Bookmarks sidebar

The Bookmarks Sidebar

The bookmarks interface has a sidebar on the left hand side that lists bookmark Collections above the divider line and bookmark Groups under the divider line.

OmniWeb bookmark Collections can be added and removed from the list using the popup menu at the bottom of the list. You can reorder these items just by dragging them to the desired location.

You can drag bookmark files into the Collections list to 'mount' the bookmarks file giving you access to the bookmarks in that file.

You can drag URLs to the Collections list to view the page the URL points to as bookmarks (a list of links).

Items below the divider line are bookmark Groups. These are like aliases, or shortcuts to folders that live in your bookmarks. When you run OmniWeb 5 for the first time the groups section of the sidebar will contain aliases to all of your top-level bookmark folders from your Personal Bookmarks.

Simply drag any bookmark folder to the sidebar in the area below the divider line in order to create a new bookmark group. You can then drag items to the bookmark groups just as though you were dragging to the original item. This can be useful when you have a bookmark folder that is buried somewhere deep in the hierarchy of your bookmarks but you frequently need to file new bookmarks into the folder. Keeping a shortcut (group) to the folder on the sidebar means you can drop items into that folder without having to dig into your hierarchy to get to it.

You can delete bookmark groups by clicking on the group you wish to delete, then press the delete or backspace key on your keyboard.

If you delete a bookmark folder that has a corresponding group on the bookmarks shelf, OmniWeb will automatically delete the bookmark group as well.


Bookmark Collections

News Feed Bookmarks

Many websites that are frequently updated, such as news sites and weblogs (web-based journals) offer News Feeds. These are often referred to by terms like RSS and RDF, and they are authored using XML. OmniWeb allows you to subscribe to these feeds and see their content right within OmniWeb's bookmarks.

News Feed Bookmarks can be automatically updated at certain intervals which can be specified using the change-checking feature of bookmarks. This applies to the top-level item only, not any children of the feed (news items).

When updated content is found, OmniWeb will display a badge on its dock icon indicating the number of updated, unread bookmarks. See Bookmark change checking for more information.

For information on how to add News Feed bookmarks, see Adding Bookmarks.

Opening Bookmarks

Using the Bookmarks menu

To open a bookmark that appears in the bookmarks menu, simply select it from the menu. The bookmark will load into the current browser window, or if none exists, OmniWeb will create one.

You can hold the key, or ⌘+⇧ when selecting a bookmark from the menu in order to open the bookmark according to your command-click preferences.

Each bookmark submenu also has an Open in New Tabs item that will open each of the top-level bookmarks in that folder into a new tab in the current window.

Using the Bookmarks page or window

Bookmark folders can be drag-and-dropped onto browser windows and into the tab drawer. When you drag into the drawer, the tabs already open in the window stay open, and when you drag into the window, existing tabs are replaced with the new tabs.

You can ⌘-double-click on bookmark groups (items under the divider line in the Bookmarks sidebar) or bookmark folders to open their contents in new tabs.

Searching Bookmarks and History

The bookmarks interface features a search field that allows you to easily search the currently selected Collection based on a number of available criteria. These criteria include all information about the bookmark — the address, title, notes, and even the content of the web page itself.

As you visit web pages, OmniWeb indexes the textual content of the page in the background. This information is stored as part of your history, and is linked back to any bookmarks you have for the page. Later, you can search through your history and bookmarks using only keywords you remember from the page — there's no need to remember the URL, or page title.

To perform a search simply type your query into the search field and the results will automatically appear as you type. To display all of the Collection again, simply clear and search text out of the field.

Adding Bookmarks

There are a number of ways you can add bookmarks in OmniWeb. While on a page you wish to bookmark you can:

At any time when in the bookmarks interface you can add a new blank bookmark by choosing Add bookmark from the contextual menu or from the Action menu that appears under the bookmarks outline.

News Feed bookmarks can be added in a few different ways:

To aid the organization of bookmarks, a sheet can optionally be presented each time you create a bookmark using the menu item or its keyboard equivalent. The sheet allows you to select a location for filing the bookmark, and allows you to edit the label and notes right when you create it. Your default location for filing new bookmarks and whether or not the sheet appears, along with other settings, are all available in the Bookmarks pane of OmniWeb preferences.

Editing Bookmarks

When viewing bookmarks, the Bookmark Info panel can be opened in the following ways:

The Bookmark Info panel allows you to change the label, address, keyword, and notes attributes, as well as change-checking intervals for each bookmark.

Many of these same attributes can also be changed right in the bookmarks outline by simply option-clicking the title or address.

Bookmarks can also contain a Keyword attribute allowing you to type the keyword specified into the location bar to quickly load the page.

Organizing Bookmarks

Drag & Drop

You can organize your bookmarks by simply dragging around folders and bookmarks, dropping them where you would like to have them stored. Create new folders and new bookmarks by right-clicking or control-clicking, or by using options available in the Action menus at the bottom of the bookmarks interface.

Bookmark Groups

The area below the Collections, after the divider line is like a shelf where you can create shortcuts to any items from your bookmarks that you like. By default, this area is populated with all of the top-level folders from your Personal Bookmarks.

You can create new aliases to your commonly-used bookmarks folders in the sidebar below the divider line by simply dragging the folder there. From then on, you can use that folder as a drop target, just as though it were the original folder.

Multiple Windows

You can have multiple views onto bookmarks open at the same time, each to different part of your bookmarks. This can make it much easier to organize things among a large number of bookmarks.

Double-clicking a bookmark folder will hoist it into a new window.

Spring Loaded

Bookmark folders and windows, as well as bookmark Collections are spring-loaded. This means that when you drag over one of these items and pause for a moment, the item will activate. Windows that are obscured in the background will come forward, bookmark Collections will reveal themselves, and bookmarks folders will spring open allowing you to drill down to the folder you're looking for.

Column Headers

Bookmarks are sortable by clicking on the column headers. You can add and remove columns from the view br right-clicking or control-clicking on the headers themselves.

Importing bookmarks from other browsers

The Import Bookmarks... command is available under the Bookmarks menu. This presents a panel where you can choose one of the preconfigured browsers from the popup list, or select a different file of your choosing to import bookmarks from.

Importing bookmarks creates a special Collection that is updated every time you restart OmniWeb reflecting any changes made to the original file. Any bookmarks you wish to add to your Personal Bookmarks can be copied by dragging them from the new Collection to their final destination.

Bookmark change checking

OmniWeb has the ability to visit your bookmarked pages in the background while OmniWeb is running to look for updated content. For example, you might bookmark a web page with information on Great Danes so that you can periodically check the page to see if they have added or updated any of the information. Instead of having to manually visit the page to check for updated content, you can tell OmniWeb to check the page once per week. If OmniWeb finds that the page has been updated since it was last visited, the bookmark becomes 'Unviewed'.

Using the Bookmark Info panel you can specify how often a bookmark should check itself for changes. The following options are available:

When OmniWeb has found bookmarks that have been updated, the icon is badged with a green check mark to indicate that it has unviewed content. This badge will propegate all the way up to the top level of bookmarks so it's easy to identify folders with updated bookmarks inside. The badges are also shown in the Favorites bar and the Bookmarks menu.

Additionally, OmniWeb will show a badge on its Dock icon when there are unviewed bookmarks. The Dock menu provides a listing of all updated bookmarks and provides and easy way to view them in new tabs or new windows.

Selecting the XX updated bookmarks item in the Dock menu brings up your bookmarks and automatically switches you to your Unviewed Content Collection if available.

The Bookmarks menu also contains an Open Next Changed Bookmark ⌥⌘C item that will open unviewed bookmarks one at a time.

Synchronizing Bookmarks across multiple machines

If you have a .Mac iDisk or other WebDAV server available to you, OmniWeb allows you to store your bookmarks on that server and keep them synchronized across multiple machines.

Bookmark synchronization keeps your Personal Bookmarks, Favorites, and My Shared Bookmarks Collections synchronized by storing these files on the server. If you are using .Mac iDisk your bookmarks are stored in the </Documents/OmniWeb/> folder. If you're using some other WebDAV server, your bookmark files are stored at the address you entered into the Bookmarks preferences. The following individual bookmarks files are stored:

Prior to turning on synchronization, these files are located in your home folder: ~/Library/Application Support/OmniWeb 5/. When you enable bookmark synchronization, these files are copied to the server, and then a local cache of the server files is created in the following folder: ~/Library/Application Support/OmniWeb 5/ServerBookmarks/. This cached copy is used whenever the server bookmarks are not available and when performing the actual synchronization. If this cached copy is ever missing, OmniWeb will just download the file as it exists back on the server.

If bookmarks files are found to already exist on the server (say, because you previously enabled synchronization on another machine) you will be prompted and given the option to use either the local bookmarks (replacing those on the server) or the server bookmarks (which will be used instead of the local bookmarks files).

After enabling synchronization, the original copies of your bookmarks files still exist, untouched, in ~/Library/Application Support/OmniWeb 5/.

When you turn bookmark synchronization off, the most recent copy of the bookmarks from the server are copied back into the local bookmarks location in your home folder: ~/Library/Application Support/OmniWeb 5/.

Once synchronization is enabled, you can manually synchronize your bookmarks by choosing Synchronize Bookmarks Now from the Bookmarks menu. You can also right-click or control-click on each synchronized collection in the sidebar of the bookmarks page or window to show a contextual menu with the option to synchronize the file immediately. The menu also displays a synchronization status — if the file has been synchronized during the current session, the last time the file was successfully synchronized, or if synchronization failed the last time OmniWeb attempted to do so.

History

History in OmniWeb appears both in the History menu, as well as in the Bookmarks interface under the History Collection.

Set your preferences for how History behaves in OmniWeb using the History preferences.

When using the History bookmarks collection, your history items behave very much like bookmarks do. You can click the column headers to sort based on the column, you can press the Delete key on your keyboard to delete history items, and you can search through history using the search field at the bottom of the history listing.

History items that appear in the History menu behave much like bookmarks in the Bookmarks menu. You can hold or ⌘+⇧ when selecting a history item from the menu to open it according to your command-click preferences.

For more information on all of the items in the History menu, including Page Marking see the Menu Reference.

© 2004 The Omni Group