Filed under: Features, Reviews, Friday Favorite
Friday Favorite: HistoryHound, bookmark with abandon
Today's Friday Favorite is a new one to me, but it's been around for a while. I just picked up the latest version of HistoryHound from St. Clair Software -- more famous, probably, for Default Folder X -- and have been using it constantly for days. Its hotkey already has its own spot in my muscle memory. Here's what it does:
HistoryHound indexes bookmarks, history and cache from all of your browsers, with presets for Camino, Firefox 2 & 3, Flock, iCab, OmniWeb, Opera, Safari, Shiira and URL Manager Pro. It means being able to bookmark willy-nilly in any browser and know that you'll be able to quickly locate noteworthy sites again, in any application.
Not just the bookmarks, though; in the background -- with a very low footprint -- HistoryHound starts indexing the full text of each page. Then you can search for exact or fuzzy matches, or with Spotlight-style boolean keywords for any text on the landing page. Search comes in two flavors: a tiny popup panel which can be assigned to a hotkey and provides a list of matches as you type, and a full, Webkit-enabled search window with page previews and a multi-column result list.
Jon Gotow, the developer, is considering implementing Delicious bookmarks, but for the time being I'm just
curl-ing them into a text file and having HistoryHound go at it. I'm also pulling all of my tagged bookmarks from Tags, and all of my Evernote web clippings (all via a combination of Ruby, AppleScript and launchd). I've got full-text search of everything I bookmark, no matter where I do it. I also have a complete history of all of my web browsing across all of the browsers I use, dating back up to 60 days (configurable), with user-definable filters to skip the popups and redirect pages.
I've been emailing quite a bit with Jon, and he's got a lot of further development planned. One thing I'm begging for, and getting a positive response on, is the ability to publish the full index to Spotlight. The HistoryHound search is great, really great, but there are amazing possibilities when that index becomes part of a full system search (and accessible to mdfind!).
HistoryHound has a 30-day free trial (download here), and runs $19.95US for a license after that. If you use multiple browsers, and enjoy being able to find things you know are there, somewhere, it's a worthwhile investment.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Casey Becking said 12:14PM on 10-16-2009
On SL 64bit it crashes on build of the index... Bummer..
Reply
gotow said 9:59PM on 10-26-2009
Grab the 1.9.7 beta. It includes several fixes and runs fine on Snow Leopard: http://www.stclairsoft.com/HistoryHound/beta.html
- Jon
DMD said 2:18PM on 10-16-2009
Ever hear of "Browseback". History Hound seems to borrow a little from it. Although "Browseback" hasn't been updated in awhile and is very much a resource hog when trying to use it while its updating its database / thumbnails of websites.
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gotow said 12:10AM on 10-17-2009
Actually, HistoryHound preceded Browseback by about a year and a half. Browseback got more press when it was released because it does visual snapshots. But as a consequence of that, it's significantly slower and requires more memory and CPU than HistoryHound when it's processing your history. My goal with HistoryHound has always been to make it something that doesn't bog down your Mac as it tracks things for you, and is quick and efficient when you want to find something.
- Jon
ken said 3:03PM on 10-16-2009
Does it sync via mobileme? this would be awesome if I could have all of my bookmarks from all of my browsers from all of my computers synced
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Timm said 11:57AM on 10-18-2009
Wouldn't HistoryHound keep bookmarks in sync between all browsers on a computer — including Safari? So, Safari would sync with MobileMe, and any changes made in Safari via MM would also get updated into the other browsers. Seems to me it'd be that simple.
At least, I'm hoping it works that way. I can definitely see myself using Chrome over Safari but I'm too dependent on my synced bookmarks to give up intercomputer syncing.
jjjji said 1:14AM on 10-17-2009
Delicious support is a MUST!
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DMD said 10:19PM on 10-17-2009
Yeah, your software looks interesting. I thought I found the solution to the problem I was trying to solve with Browseback, but I hardly ever use it anymore because its way too resource intensive. It's practically unusable and I frequently delete the database to start afresh.
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Rene said 10:39AM on 11-01-2009
Very very interesting. Very useful, as I find myself searching Safari history quite often. However, I keep my bookmarks in Evernote as well and am thinking of using Tags. Can you explain how you integrate Historyhound with Evernote and Tags in more detail? I'm not much of a coder/scripter...
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Brett Terpstra said 11:14AM on 11-01-2009
Tags is easy with the latest release, you just add a new item to the index for ~/Library/Caches/Metadata/Tags/Bookmark and tell it to import webloc files.
For Evernote, I have a Ruby script running with launchd which uses AppleScript to scan through all notes which are web clips (source:web.clip) and outputs the source urls to a text file, which is indexed by HistoryHound. It only runs if Evernote is open, making the assumption that there won't be new tags if it's not running. Setup on that one is complex enough that it would be difficult without some scripting knowledge, though. I can't make any promises, but I'll see if I can get the script pared down and make it flexible enough to be a drop-in-and-run deal.