14 DAY TRIAL // The important role the Internet started to play in our lives nowadays is undeniable. To ease up surfing to important websites, all popular browsers on the market have integrated a favorites/bookmark folder where we can keep our links stored in an organized fashion. However, these are not fully protected from disaster and can be easily lost when re-installing the system, or we simply forget to back them up before an important update.
Thus, the use of a standalone bookmark manager ready to store your favorite web links and export them to your browser of choice becomes a good way to solve the problem. Bookmark House is portable and claims support for all popular web browsers. You can download the application and use it under a 30-day trial basis after which you will have to buy it for $27.70. In order to be able to use this software, your system should meet the following requirements: Intel Atom, Celeron M and higher, AMD Athlon 1400 and higher processor, 256 MB RAM and 50 MB HDD space.
The first thing you will notice when opening Bookmark House is the colorful interface. It will certainly prove itself appealing to most computer users. The main screen of this application will basically display a default list of sites that are considered important by its developer. Once you have activated the browser integration, you will be able to see your browser’s history. Quite a downside is the fact that you are not informed when first opening the application that you have to activate the browser integration feature to fully use the program. For the not so advanced users, this might prove irritating at the very least.
You can start managing the favorites/bookmark folders by clicking the designated tab. Here, you will find a list of predefined folders, like "Common Folder" or "Read this later" but you also have the possibility to create new folders to fit your needs. This way, you can organize your bookmarks in categories you use at work or at home just by surfing the web. The "Manage Favorites" window will help you create new folders or customize existing ones. Upon generating a new category, you can enter its name, as well as a short description.
This description field might prove useful if you are not the only person using the application and you don’t want to cause confusion. This window also offers you the possibility to import the favorites from your browser. The not so nice thing is that when you want to import your folders from Opera or IE, you will receive an error message stating that the application cannot find the path to the Favorites folder. However, the app is supposed to support all popular browsers (IE, Firefox and Opera), except for Google’s Chrome, which would have been nice to have as well.
When adding a site to a certain Favorites folder, you can also add a note to the entry. This feature is useful when you need some data about that specific site and you want to have it in an easy-to-reach location.
History tab will enable you, with the help of the contextual menu to copy the URL to clipboard, add it to favorites or get brief statistics about it, such as the number of visits paid to that site, the time spent on it and the date of your last visit. The downside here is that until you activate Bookmark House's browser integration, the program will display statistics for only a brief set of locations like NASA or Twitter. A heads-up about this would have been extremely helpful to a first-timer.
Context menu of History will give you the option to delete the entire history of a certain site or to delete a site after a user-defined period of time. Export and Import menus will help you send your bookmarks to a PDA device or access the synchronization wizard to ease up the transition of the links. This will give you full mobility of your bookmark collection.
The interesting thing that this tool can do is that it can create a portable version of itself. You just select portable mode from the Export and Import menu and the application will create in its installation location a sub-folder marked “portable,” where you will find the executable and an Access database with all of the bookmarks that you have created. This feature will enable you to copy this folder onto a USB drive and carry your favorite links collection wherever you might need it.
The Settings window is basically the one that enables you to customize Bookmark House to fit your needs. The first thing you can choose is Browser Integration. As we stated before, this is a must-have basically in order to be able to properly use the application. You can choose from IE, Firefox and Opera or use all.
Manage History tab will let you select to record or not history. If you don’t know exactly what websites you visit the most, this feature along with the one delivering statistics, will help you get an overview of the sites that you need / visit the most.
Bookmark House also comes with bilingual support for English and German, a feature you can find and change in the Language tab of the Settings window.
If you want to protect your notes and the synchronization process, you can easily set a password in order to keep your personal information private. Another interesting feature that this software offers is the possibility to use a proxy server. You can set all the needed data in the specified tab.
In case disaster strikes, you may select a backup folder so that you can have another copy of the database that contains your bookmarks. This feature is very useful especially for those who have a large and well organized database and a real-time saver. You can also select the path to the favorite’s directory of your browser.
Backing up and restoring the entire bookmark database is supported by the application, options that show strong accent on the safety measures provided to prevent losing the database completely.
Last but not least, the Compress tab comes to help users that have a problem with disk space. This is particularly useful when the application is employed portably and manages a huge database, as it allows you to gain some space on the removable device.
One of the features that might have been of real help for users of this type of software is a link checker one. It's nice to be able to check the availability of a link directly from your bookmark manager and not open your browser for that. Unfortunately, this feature cannot be found on Bookmark House.
All in all, this application might be an option for the users that have a great amount of bookmarks to manage. Those not in the habit of saving links as they surf the web are definitely not targeted by the developer of the application. The nice and pretty much appealing interface, although quite intricate during the first runs, offers the possibility to backup important data. For the ones that require or just need portability, this tool manages to satisfy that need as well.
The Good This tool will help you manage your bookmarks with ease and keep them well organized in the exact categories you want. It might be a little hard to understand at first but it gets the job done.
The Bad
The major downside of this application is the fact that the export tool does not work right. It's not exactly okay to have a major function that only works for one browser. The errors the synchronization feature has leave a huge dent in its value. Also, the fact that it doesn't notify the user at start-up that they have to activate the browser integration in order to fully access the application's capabilities is not a plus at all.
Although the interface is colorful, an average computer user might find it hard to employ. It may just take some time to understand the basics of what this tool has to offer.
The Truth All in all, this piece of software could come in handy for users who have a larger than average number of bookmarks to organize. However, the fact that there are cheaper alternatives makes this program seem expensive. Those that don't really need software especially to manage their bookmarks will definitely not find the $27.70 fee suitable. Also, the not-so-easy-to-understand interface for less advanced users is a big drawback, not to mention the major features that don't work.
Here are some snapshots of the application in action:
