JERRY KRINOCK  Thanks to Tom, and Steven for bringing this to our attention. Websense informed me today that the issue is resolved and that, as of today's daily broadcast, sheepsystems.com is no longer listed as a malicious site.

Jerry Krinock  
(Version 5.3.8)

JERRY KRINOCK  Thanks, Tom, and Steve, for bringing this to my attention. Websense just informed me that the issue is resolved and that their next daily database update will broadcast the fact that sheepsystems.com is not a malicious site.

To the reader: Sorry that this kind of noised up MacUpdate. Please scroll WAY down to read all the nice reviews of what you're ^really^ interested in, Bookdog :)

Jerry Krinock  
(Version 5.3.8)

JERRY KRINOCK  Regarding the comment by SJK... I took the movie down a couple weeks ago because it was too outdated. BookMacster looks different now. In place of the movie there is the completed Help Book (documentation.) Oh, yes and the dark gray background has been removed from the Tag Cloud now. It looks much better.  
(Version 5.3.6)

JERRY KRINOCK  I believe that Xenophile is referring to the three rows of white-on-black tokens just below the title bar in the screenshot shown above. If you would pull down the split bar below them you would see seven more rows. But they are not tabs :) They are *tags*. Tags are used in Firefox and Delicious bookmarks. The whole thing up there is called a *tag cloud*, as described here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tag_cloud

except that we didn't like the idea of different-sized tags, so instead we put the number of occurrences in square brackets after the word.

How many rows you have in the tag cloud depends on how many tags you've added to your bookmarks. If they are Safari bookmarks, it will be zero, since Safari does not support tags, and the tag cloud is not shown.  
(Version 5.3.6)

JERRY KRINOCK  How about let's fix it instead of a workaround :) I've tried to reproduce this but it works fine for me, as shown in this short screencast. (Warning: Screencast has audio track.)

http://sheepsystems.com/files/SafariNoCrash.mov

Regarding the "little piece of Bookdog that's still in touch with Safari", I presume that Jayce is referring to Bookwatchdog. Although I didn't show that in the screencast, Bookwatchdog is indeed activated in the Preferences. I also did another test after Bookwatchdog sorted bookmarks and still no crash. We did have a crashing issue when Safari 4.0 beta was first released. Safari would crash if you were in the middle of editing a bookmark name when Bookwatchdog did its sorting. That was fixed a while ago.

Jayce, if you or anyone else could tell me what to reproduce the crash, we'll see what we can do!

Thanks,

Jerry Krinock  
(Version 5.3.6)

JERRY KRINOCK  I tried Lingon a few months ago, but found that the mean time between Lingon crashes on Mac OS 10.5 was about ten minutes. Also, Lingon would not "load" the command (using launchcntl, if I recall correctly), so your changes would not take effect until you logged out/in. So, if I needed a scheduling utility I'd give this Cronette a try.

Terrible name choice, though, for something which is not supposed to use cron and I presume uses launchd. Should have called it Launchette.  
(Version 1.0.1)

JERRY KRINOCK  The main new feature added in the latest update, 4.3, activation by "double tapping and holding the ⌘ key", instead of just holding it down for X seconds, sounds complicated, but it is a huge improvement. Although I do naturally hold the ⌘ key down when I can't remember the keyboard shortcut, I also do it while I'm thinking of what I want to do next, and in these instances KeyCue was annoying. The new activation method is a great idea and, if the developer has not done so already, I'd recommend making it the default trigger setting for new users. Users who were annoyed as I was by previous versions should give 4.3+ a try. Open the KeyCue Settings ► Activation panel and set to "press ⌘ twice and hold".

Cool app. Next challenges for the developer: Give me cues for my function keys (F1, F2, etc.), and cues for keyboard shortcuts that I have set using QuicKeys X3.  
(Version 4.3)

JERRY KRINOCK  I've used Cheetah3D for about 10 hours now and am particularly impressed that, even with the complex relationships that it must be maintaining between objects, 'Undo' has never given an unexpected result and the thing has never raised an exception or crashed. The design must be very well thought out.  
(Version 4.5.1)

JERRY KRINOCK  I had been using a previous version 1.3.2 and found that, when reading in sdef files, it would wipe out the 'type' of the 'direct parameter' of the 'open' command of the 'Standard Suite'. This version 1.5.2 has that bug fixed. Works great now. Thank you, Jean-Daniel!  
(Version 1.5.2)

JERRY KRINOCK  I made a little screencast and posted it on our site to show how Migrate Bookmarks works...

http://www.sheepsystems.com/products/bookdog/movies/migrate.html

As noted in the caption, may be a good 5 minutes to view before bedtime.  
(Version 4.3)

JERRY KRINOCK  After playing with Shiira for over an hour, I finally figured out how to delete a bookmark or folder. After clicking the funny button with two horizontal lines in it at the bottom of the cool black panel to show the "shiira://shelf", select the item(s) you want to delete and then right-click to show the contextual menu which has Delete. Although you can move items in the black panel, you can't delete.

But I can't figure out how to rename a bookmark or folder.

Jerry  
(Version 2.2)

JERRY KRINOCK  Maybe Ikey or someone who has been playing around with Shiira's bookmarks can help me out.

Ikey mentioned "importing" bookmarks. I don't see any way to do that. There is certainly no 'Import Bookmarks' item in the File menu. Maybe Ikey used some other utility?

I notice that Shiira's Bookmarks Panel (the black thing) shows "Shiira" bookmarks, only but when you click the other button at the bottom and show shiira://shelf, then you get several collections to choose from: "Safari Bookmarks", "Firefox Bookmarks" and "Bookmarks". The latter seems to be a "smart" collection that shows Safari+Firefox+Shiira bookmarks. Very confusing. Can anyone explain this better?

And here's the question that's got me REALLY stumped: How would you ever delete a bookmark or a bookmark folder? It seems like there should be a way to do that, but I sure can't find it. If there is no way to delete bookmarks, lots of Shiira users must have lots of bookmarks!

Finally, I clicked on Shiira's Forum on their site,

http://g.shiira.jp/groups/list/1

but I get a blank page, even when using Shiira. Does anyone know if there's a trick to accessing Shiira's Forum?

Jerry Krinock  
(Version 2.2)

JERRY KRINOCK  This review reports two incidents....

FIRST INCIDENT

REPORT: "bookmark manager in Safari is no longer accessible".

Developer's Interpretation of Steps To Reproduce:

1. Activate Safari.

2. Click menu > Bookmarks > Show All Bookmarks".

3. Verify that frontmost window shows bookmarks.

4. Use Bookdog [somehow].

5. Repeat steps 1-2.

EXPECTED RESULT: Same as step 3.

REPORTED RESULT: Either the Show All Bookmarks item is gone, or clicking it does not cause the frontmost window does not show bookmarks.

Developer's Response: I'm always open to reports that can help me make Bookdog better, but I'm having trouble reproducing this. If anyone can tell me some conditions, or usage of Bookdog in step 4 that will reproduce the REPORTED RESULT, I will pay that person a $100 USD reward.

SECOND INCIDENT

REPORT: "Firefox has lost the bookmarks toolbar functionality"

Developer's Interpretation of Steps To Reproduce:

1. Activate Firefox.

2. Verify that there is a bookmarks toolbar.

3. Verify that clicking a bookmark in the toolbar causes Firefox to visit the url indicated by the bookmark.

4. Use Bookdog [somehow].

5. Repeat steps 1-2.

EXPECTED RESULT: Same as step 2.

REPORTED RESULT: Either there is no toolbar, or clicking a bookmark in the toolbar does not cause Firefox to visit the url indicated by the bookmark.

Developer's Response: Same as my response to first incident.

Sincerely,

Jerry Krinock, developer  
(Version 4.2.12)

JERRY KRINOCK  I did some quick tests on the latest version and was unable to reproduce any of this since, except for the Opera toolbar being empty because, as far as I can see, Opera does not have a toolbar. I'll update to the latest version of Opera to verify this, and post some screen capture movies on this later.

Jerry Krinock, developer  
(Version 4.2.12)

JERRY KRINOCK  I've been getting more requests for Shiira lately, and will likely support Shiira first. Flock is on the list of things to do also.

Jerry Krinock, developer  
(Version 4.2.12)

JERRY KRINOCK  OK! We got it!

After two hours of getting reports like this (a couple weeks ago), we added instructions for upgraders: "Trash your old version before dragging in the new one." Success rate for people using this fix has been 100%.

Thanks for the reports!  
(Version 3.11.14)

JERRY KRINOCK  Thanks for posting the note here. We were pretty busy that day!

This ancient history was fixed in a couple hours.

Sincerely,

Jerry Krinock  
(Version 3.10.7)

JERRY KRINOCK  Good comment. We use the Installer because of our background application, Bookwatchdog. The problem is for upgraders: We want to make sure that any old versions of Bookwatchdog are quit and deleted. It is true that root authorization should not be necessary for this, but without it, we find that the installation fails for about 1% of users. Since we added the root authorization to our install process, these complaints have disappeared.

If you're a new user, or if you don't want to use the Installer and are smart enough to open Activity Monitor and quit Bookwatchdog and trash your old installation before installing, then you may download our zip archive and do a simple drag and drop install.

Sincerely,

Jerry Krinock  
(Version 3.10.7)

JERRY KRINOCK  We very clearly state the limitation of the unlicensed version, prominently, right above the download link:

"Downloads are free and demonstrate all of Bookdog's tricks; purchase of a license will be required prior to saving your managed bookmarks. In accordance with our two-year warranty, either is a free upgrade to anyone who licensed any version of Bookdog. After you download it, doubleclick on Bookdog's kennel to get him out of the box and start the Installer.

Download Bookdog 3.2.3 now (2.9 MB)"

Please explain how we can be more open and honest than that. I'd really like to improve the presentation.  
(Version 3.2.3)

JERRY KRINOCK  Please tell me where you found Bookdog represented as freeware.  
(Version 3.2.3)

JERRY KRINOCK  In my opinion, Mishmash is correct. Bookdog was incorrectly listed as shareware. I have just revised the listing to indicate that it is indeed "commercial".

The error was introduced by MacUpate which, readers may be surprised to learn, wrote the listing for Bookdog after monitoring our our website for changes, I presume using a robot. (Although the limitation of the unlicensed version is stated there, MacUpdate must have overlooked it, or has a different definition of shareware.) They wrote our listeing because, as others have mentioned, Bookdog is still needing more features and a better appearance, so, after customer support which is our #1 priority, we're spending as much time as possible on engineering and not marketing.

We do have a policy of giving free licenses to any prospective customer who points out bugs or errors in our product or sales process. Mishmash, thank you very much for helping us correct this error, and please identify yourself to sales@sheepsystems.com so we can send you your free license with its three-year warranty.  
(Version 2.0.10)

JERRY KRINOCK  We plan to add support for these other browsers in the coming months.  
(Version 2.0.8)