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Free Bookmarks Utility for PCsDelete your broken links with ease |
By Dragos Ichim, Editor, Software Reviews
15th of April 2008, 11:35 GMT
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Whatever you are using, Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera or the old Netscape browser, you will still have to manage your bookmarks at one point or another. That is indeed not a difficult task when you have just a few favorites, as you can test them individually by accessing the websites directly and search for updates of your missing links. But it might not seem so easy if you have hundreds sorted in different folders. As checking them one by one can bring days of assiduous work, there is a need for a software to do this while we can have a lunch break. For a program to be "worth installing", it would sound nice if a feature like Auto-repair broken links was included.
Link200 is a free software from Veign labs and comes as an uber easy-to-use alternative for bookmark management. Downloading
and installing the software doesn't take much of your time because it is done in a matter of seconds. The program's interface is quite simple and just the essential options are available, but you can't expect much from a program which takes only 1.12MB on your hard drive.
The window is resizable but I do believe the written code behind this option is poorly developed, as there is no minimum size and the window can be reduced dramatically, looking like a folder's icon. Like this was not enough, if you want to see all the program's columns, you will be able to resize them individually, but when you drag from the window's margins the columns come back to their original size.
Using the Software's Wizard, all you need to do is to select the source of your bookmarks/favorites. These can be not only Mozilla, IE or Netscape, but also a text or bookmark file. The program checks if you are using a proxy server when you are connecting to the Internet and, if you do, writing down the server's name and its port is required. Since I'm not using any proxies, this option could not be tested and I have to take the publisher's word for it, especially because I've tried to mark it down and couldn't and the program returned a message saying I'm ok to go to the next step.
Choosing one of the three browsers will return a scan and a complete report with the available links, and you can mark for deletion the broken or missing ones. They are differentiated easily having a big red circle attached. Regarding speed, I can't promise you are going to be fully satisfied as it takes about a half a second per link to be verified. The software's scan might be designed to be auto-optimizing, as I saw an improvement for repeated scans, but this is not mentioned anywhere, so you should not take it for granted.
You can unmark all the bookmarks or select only the ones to be deleted. If normally just the error links are displayed, you can choose viewing them separately in browser or see just the redirected ones. Problem Bookmark's utility couldn't be found as it proved to be faulty during my tests.
If you have a text file containing all your bookmarks somewhere on your hard drive and you wish to perform a check, using this program may not bring you satisfaction. As I have tested this option using tab or comma delimited bookmarks in a file, or just the websites' URL, all in quotes, the result was an error for every individual link. The text file was an export of another bookmark manager application, since this one does not have such a feature. Only when I manually erased the quotes, Link200 started to perform normally, but I don't think spending time to erase 1k of quotes is what you want to do in your spare time.
As the only browsers accepted are Firefox, Internet Explorer and Netscape, I wonder when Opera will benefit from the developer's gratitude to be included in the list. The software's menu is poor in options and features. As a matter of fact, a Tools menu with just one option is present (View Bookmarks Backups). Don't try to test it as it will erase the backup file for your Favorites without asking you a supplementary question. Fair enough, the publisher has made a footnote telling you the backup file will be deleted from your hard drive. Opening the file will show you the current bookmarks from the chosen browser in a HTML form.
The About menu contains info about the software and the developer, a link to his/her website, and a "donationware" window if you like to support the further development of this software and the additional ones. Fair enough I say, but this window containing a Paypal link is annoying because it is present everywhere within the application. More than this, the publisher suggests you the amount to be donated (10 USD). I would say to make it to 100 USD, as it is also a pretty round sum. There is no help file or anything like a hint to help you understand how the program was built or the steps it performs during scanning.
The Good
It is like an über easy to use free application as your broken links will be deleted within a couple of clicks. The bookmarks can be imported and verified from any text or favorite/bookmark files.
The Bad
The program's interface and architecture is poorly developed. Help file is missing completely. The donationware window is present in every step of the Wizard. Checking Opera bookmarks option is not available. Exporting the link file is not available, as well as any little extras like for example showing FavIcons for URLs. It has faulty code architecture behind window resize option.
The Truth
Link200 is a software which I believe to be in its first steps of development, and adding a beta to its version number should be more appropriate. It has lots of missing features and does only what a basic bookmark manager should do: delete the broken links.
Here are some snapshots of the application in action:
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NOT RATED |
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