DrunkenBlog

Of URLwell for Mac OS X

A reader named Dan pointed me towards an app called URLwell, which well, acts as a well in your menu bars for URLs.

Using it couldn't be simpler: Launch the app (or add it to your login items), and you get a little icon in the menu bar. Drag a URL from the address bar in your browser of choice to it, and it adds them to a list. Once they're added, you can click on the URLwell icon and see them, and selecting one loads it in your default browser.

Now, Dan left a link to this in the comments for a reason...

Few things have amused me more than how positively aghast some readers were at my tendency towards desktop-itis. It wasn't enough for them to be anal about their desktop, oh no, just knowing mine was in perpetual entropy was keeping them up at nights. I truly broke some hearts with that one.

I get it, because I'm the same way in other areas, but having "PS: I can't believe your desktop is..." tacked onto completely unrelated emails months later still makes me laugh. My messy desktop was only part of the problem, the other being my dock kept accruing bookmarks...

It's not as though I wasn't aware of being able to drag a URL from the address bar to a folder in the bookmarks bar, or didn't know how to bookmark in general, but rather:

• There are a few sites I access several times a day, but Safari has a habit of going wonky in the background and Camino has some threading things that can cause it to periodically suck some cycles. So I close them, but they're a click away if the URL is in the dock.

• I often save .webloc files for projects on disk instead of within Safari and such, because it's just easier for the way I work. It's nothing personal against bookmarks in browsers, it's just that for some of what I do I hate the iTunes-style interface for dealing with them. I can drag them to the desktop, or the Dock, but unfortunately you aren't able to drag to a folder in the Dock.

  The Dock is obviously aware of folders, but it won't let you drag anything to them from an application except the Finder. I.E., if I put a folder in the Dock I can then drag a file to it from the Finder and it will be moved, but snippets or URLs from or such from an application are ignored. I still don't really get this.

• I tried the whole "To Read" folder, where I'd just drag the URL I wanted to follow up on -- or would be using in something I'm working on soon -- to a folder in the bookmarks bar. Unfortunately, I noticed I wasn't actually getting around to reading any of them: Out of sight, out of mind. I'd just forget they were even there because I'd be focused on what I was doing then...

  Having things I know I'll be dealing with soon right there in the Dock means I'm reminded they're there, and once the Dock is so small I can barely see it I know I need to catch up. Of course I always think I'll get to them straight quick, but don't, so they just accrue to comical levels.

To be fair, I'm also lazy as hell.

Once something 'works' for me I stick with it until it stops working or I bump into something that makes it all better. I.E., I didn't get into themes on OS X because I like teh shiny, I just couldn't take pinstripes anymore, and had to find something to help as I was starting to hate looking at the computer once they'd become a symbol of horrible UI. It was ShapeShifter or learning how to use the computer with a blindfold.

The short of it is, URLwell helped me clear out the Dock straight quick. It's extremely easy to use, and can be used from my various browsers.

It lets me:

• Access a URL I often use very quickly.

• Throw a URL into it I want to reference soon and don't want to have to hunt for.

It does bring back some of the "out of sight, out of mind" problem, but I understand this is my weirdness and probably not something people care about in general. Either way, it's better than if I were using a toolbar folder in the browser. Having it up there in the menu bar makes it more visible, so I'm more likely to remember they're there.

It very much reminds me of the Classic Mac OS days, when I'd drag URLs and such to a pop-up folder, and the tab on the side of the screen would serve as its own reminder, and until I can add a URLs folder to the Dock and drag things to it without first dragging them to the Desktop and then the Dock, it's an unobtrusive and simple solution.

It does what it says on the box, and I'm digging on it, but not really using it.

I mentioned Tiger locked up hard on me the other day while trying to use Software Update, which is always a pisser, but didn't mention one of the reasons I was so pissed was that over the course of the last two days, I'd cleaned my Dock up nice and moved a bunch of URLs to the URLwell to see if I'd end up using it in practice.

After rebooting, the Dock was just fine, but all those URLs were gone. From what I can tell, it doesn't actually save them to disk when you add them, but rather once you quit URLwell. Since the whole system locked up, it wasn't quit normally or gracefully and didn't save any of them out to disk... I wasn't amused.

Unless I'm missing something, which is always possible -- and at 6am even likely -- it means to really use it I'd have to quit and then relaunch it every single time I added a URL to it that I didn't want to chance losing to a kernel panic or GUI lockup. That's not going to work.

 Posted by drunkenbatman
    August 19, 2005, at 06:46 AM