

Show HN: Escape from Bookmark Hell - Turing_Machine
http://pse.contraterrene.com/

======
rickhanlonii
Haters gunna hate, but I like the spirit of the presentation.

This is better than a flashy flat one-page design with a lot of color and no
substance. It's more personal, and is a unique touch. I know why he created
the product, what it does, and how to get it.

As for the product itself, I think there's a real need for better bookmark
organization that's done well. I'm not sure if this is it, because from the
features exhibited it seems a lot like just using Evernote Web Clipper. I'd
like to see features that help organize my bookmark folders better, maybe
using tags for links and folders or some other creative organization tactic.
Evernote WC can do this, but it doesn't do it in a lightweight way where I can
get good overview of my links.

Better yet, having a relation graph would be nice too--grouping by links added
in a certain session or around a certain concept. For example, I want to find
all of the links I found when I was looking up "CSS vertically centering div".

Anyway, great work OP.

~~~
donw
Allow me to explain (my) hate.

I saw this while browsing from my phone at a coffee shop and thought to
myself, "hey, bookmarks are a pain in the ass, let's have a look"

The product could be awesome, but it took so long to get to the point that I
gave up, and when I did, my history was completely full of worthless slides
that it was easier to close the tab than go back.

This presentation is a great example of bad design. It wastes the readers time
by failing to convey useful information quickly. I am forced to sit through a
seemingly endless stream of totally worthless transitions and effects.

A presentation like this reflects very badly on the product it represents. It
assumes that _it_ is more important than _me_ , the person on the other end of
the keyboard.

~~~
Turing_Machine
So you're saying it should be designed more like
[http://www.piku.jp/](http://www.piku.jp/) then? :-)

~~~
donw
Unless you're planning on selling coupons in Japan for a startup that I worked
with three years ago, then hell no. It should be designed like Instapaper.

------
Turing_Machine
It's a pure client-side personal search engine for bookmarks, using HTML5
local storage. You can add (and search) arbitrary text to the record. It can
import your existing bookmarks, too.

Sorry about the vertigo. :-)

If you want to skip the presentation and go straight to the live site:
[http://pse.contraterrene.com/engine/](http://pse.contraterrene.com/engine/)

~~~
user24
I liked the presentation, didn't like the history-filling aspect.

But what I don't like is the fact that I have to change the way I bookmark
things, and I certainly don't like the fact that I've got to highlight text.
Can't you change it to a plugin which hijacks the default add bookmark
feature, and indexes the text of the page automatically?

The latter is probably more important.

You've definitely identified a real problem here.

~~~
SanjayUttam
"I liked the presentation, didn't like the history-filling aspect." +1

------
alan_cx
Bookmark hell? What about click through stuff hell?

Needless to say, 5 clicks through, I gave up.

How about a normal link to a normal page explaining your offer?

~~~
teh_klev
And has cheek to say:

"Cross-platform, cross-browser Works just about everywhere (except Internet
Explorer, sorry about that) (Need IE support? Email for a price quote :-))"

Meh.

~~~
Turing_Machine
Here's the deal: this is a personal project I wrote for myself (and anyone
else who wants to use it).

I decided some time ago that I wasn't going to worry about making stuff work
in IE unless I was getting paid for it. In this case, I'm not. It's free (it
doesn't even have ads). I don't use IE. I don't even _know_ anyone who uses
IE. Even my older non-technical family members use Chrome (or Safari, if they
have Macs).

I've spent way too much time working around IE brokenness to want to do it for
fun.

Microsoft has had 18 years to fix IE. They still haven't done it. At this
stage, it's not my problem (again, unless I'm getting paid).

Sorry.

~~~
teh_klev
Sorry, in that presentation you just come off as jumping onto the "look at me,
aren't I rad for not supporting IE" smartarse bullshit wagon. Perhaps leave an
explanation as to why even IE10 isn't supported?

~~~
Turing_Machine
I really don't want to have an IE flame war here. "Not supported" means just
that: "not supported". It might work in IE 10 (or more likely, 11). I don't
know. If it doesn't, I won't fix it. Not for free.

Microsoft has $68 billion _in cash_. They can afford a lot more developer time
than I can.

~~~
chris_wot
That's fair enough. Given you aren't actually charging anything for it, then
there's no cheek. I'm hoping that most people understand that this is a
personal project.

FWIW, ignore these comments. Their tone is ridiculous and not constructive.
Instead of saying "I think that there's an issue with clicking on the back
button, here's a pointer to fix it", they've decided to use non-constructive
criticism along the lines of "You're a loser because you can't allow people to
use the back button".

Honestly, I've never understood this sort of thing. It smacks of elitism, but
the underlying causes is a deep seated unease about the commenter's own
confidence.

------
marknutter
Still prefer [http://historio.us](http://historio.us) \- it scrapes the pages
you bookmark for better searching too. I want my bookmarks available to me on
any computer, not just the ones I happen to have installed certain software
on.

------
pyre
Thanks for polluting my web history so that I can't just hit "back" to get to
HN. :P

~~~
DjangoReinhardt
I present to you three alternatives for better browsing:

1\. CTRL+click

2\. Middle-click

3\. Right-click link -> Open in new tab.

One of them should (hopefully) work if you are using a browser that supports
tabbed windows.

;)

EDIT: Almost forgot this one: If you are browsing on your mobile device, long-
press -> "open in new tab" or "open in background tab" should (ideally) work.

~~~
pyre
Your long-winded reply of "just use tabbed browsing" does not address the fact
that this is a sloppy UI choice. You're also implicitly stating that when
someone makes a website it's ok for them to base their design decisions around
the assumption that the user will be using tabbed browsing in such a fashion.

~~~
chris_wot
I'd probably have read your comment in a positive light if you weren't so
aggressive. The author would probably like to you to be civil to them as well.
Is this so hard?

~~~
pyre
It wasn't intended to be aggressive. It was meant as more of a lighthearted
sarcastic jab (hence the emoticon). I guess this didn't translate well.

~~~
chris_wot
That's the problem with this medium I'm afraid. Often it comes off other than
we meant, and feelings get hurt. For the record, I'm glad there was no real
malice behind the comment :-)

------
DjangoReinhardt
I liked the concept but I have a few niggling issues:

> The link opens to the presentation. I'd rather it open at the /engine/ and
> have a link to the presentation.

> Copy all the points of the presentation into a page and keep that handy for
> accessibility. Will probably help tone down the entitled, asshole-y comments
> a bit.

> Explain clearly where the data is being stored. Where does the bookmarks
> file that I exported actually go? Where is this database that you mention?
> On your server? On my local machine?

> Can you convert the independent page/tab so that it opens in a modal window
> instead? Will help me remember the context of the page. YMMV, of course.

> Convert the menu into a sidebar and delete the link/tab/button entirely.

Just a few thoughts/ideas/suggestions/opinions. YMMV. I like it but not sure
how I can effectively to use it yet. Good luck!

------
crisnoble
This is pretty neat, when I finally got to the tab i opened it on, it was on
the last slide (of a deck i did not know existed). When I clicked to try i had
no idea what was going on. My suggestion, write your presentation in paragraph
form and put it with the product somewhere.

~~~
Turing_Machine
Thanks. Good idea.

------
ChikkaChiChi
1\. Fantastic use of current web technologies.

2\. Localized for privacy-minded individuals.

3\. Stupid simple to use.

Fantastic tool! Might not be everyone's cup of tea, but Rome wasn't built by
the Internet Peanut Gallery. :)

Keep up the good work!

------
waterlion
What is this? Sorry, but I'm not going to watch shapes flying around my screen
to find out.

------
SanjayUttam
Great idea, I've been meaning to do something like this since forever and it
always got sidetracked. Big plus on the ability to free-text search all the
content (not just title/url/etc...). I am not sure if any other service offers
this for _free_ (though Google might). It's a big fail [for me] to have a
bookmarking service that stores my URLs but doesn't allow me to search all of
the text.

As someone who has been using the same bookmarking service since about 2006
and has several thousand bookmarks related to various development
domains/langs/etc; this is very useful.

------
contextual
The intro was very long and boring. You should be able to explain exactly what
your service does while standing on one leg. That spiel would give someone a
vicious leg cramp.

------
Ixiaus
I use org-mode and emacs now for bookmarks.

Org-protocol + bookmarklets makes it easy, just click the "Bookmark"
bookmarklet and it sends the URL/Description (anything on the page that I want
really) to emacsclient which uses my own capture template and prompts me for
some keywords.

C-c / /, ack, and ctags makes searching those bookmarks very fast and easy for
things I vaguely remember!

------
leokun
I built something that'll store my bookmarks via Dropbox's datastore. I
haven't added search yet, but it has tagging:

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dripmarks/oeibaijn...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dripmarks/oeibaijncimbhaodhikifokafmjpgjkd)

------
mapleoin
I'm feeling dizzy.

------
harel
I like the idea and the locality of it all, and I like the execution. However,
I've been using dragdis for a while now and it solves most of my bookmarking
needs in a similar way (though 'cloud' based). Regardless though - this is a
very nice solution.

------
andreros
The slideshow is making me dizzy. I think it would be better without the
transition.

~~~
h2s
I'm sad to say that I gave up reading it before it was finished because of
exactly this. On a large screen, it's really disorientating.

------
basicallydan
I really like this. Nice presentation and cool app. The only problem is, I'm a
big fan of synchronized bookmarks which work on all my versions of Chrome. For
now, I'm going to just attempt to organise my bookmarks :)

------
dc_ploy
The way I organize my bookmarks. Just remove the title and leave the ico.
[http://i.imgur.com/WEujxYk.png](http://i.imgur.com/WEujxYk.png)

~~~
rschmitty
Me too (tho I also use folders to group sometimes), but that has nothing to do
with the article or the solution to the problem :)

This is for people with more than 30 bookmarks

------
LAXF40
There's this little thing called del.icio.us in which it's possible to achieve
the exact same functionality (and more with some social features), have you
heard of it?

~~~
Turing_Machine
Of course I have. I don't want my bookmarks to be "social", though. Nor do I
want to upload them for data mining by a commercial service.

------
davidjhamp
Really like that the whole thing is a bookmarklet, good choice.

------
smilekzs
Evernote web clipper.

~~~
blumkvist
this+delicious.

------
codetoon
Great tool, btw it would have been wonderful if it could support accessing
bookmarks from any machine. I doubt' it supports in its current form?

------
daGrevis
Too bad that they aren't stored in the cloud. I want my bookmarks to be synced
across my devices.

~~~
Turing_Machine
Some kind of cloud sync would definitely be useful. On the other hand, there's
something to be said for pure client-side. Note that the site is still up
despite making the front page of HN. :-)

------
abrichr
None of the images load for me, unless I open them in a new tab and hit
'refresh'.

------
retube
doesn't chrome have this built in?

going a step further, i'd like full text search of every page I've ever
visited. bookmarking, even a single click, is a hassle and easily forgetten
when grokking many pages in quick succession.

~~~
tarr11
Ctrl+H is halfway there (but no FT search of pages)

------
zvrba
Did he just reimplement "Send to OneNote" and parts of OneNote itself?

------
anonymfus
Classic Opera feature.

Select text, context menu, "Copy to Note".

------
vixen99
Terrible presentation. Unless I'm missing something, Scrapbook on FF has been
doing all this for me for a couple of years. Admittedly it is not supported as
yet for > v17 but otherwise it's a terrific tool.

------
flylib
cool tool but one of the advantages of using Safari is seamless integration
between my iPhone and Safari Bookmarks

------
rodrigocoelho
This is similar to kippt.com.

~~~
ChikkaChiChi
As a user of Kippt, this is patently false.

