Several TUAW readers have tipped us to the fact that many Apple Stores were in the Halloween spirit last night, handing out treats for ghouls, goblins, and Mac nerds who wandered by.

However, it sounds like Apple was playing the anonymous homeowner to Charlie Brown, who always got a rock instead of candy in his bag. The Apple Stores were not giving out sugary treats to the tots with their parents in tow, but they did get bookmarks. Yay.

The bookmarks are pretty cool, though. Printed in a beautiful turquoise color, the iPod nano-sized bookmarks have magnets on the inside tips so you can fold them around a page and they'll stick. Apple design savvy strikes again!

Apple fans apparently "ate up" the bookmarks; the post on iPhone Savior mentioned that one store was out of them by 7:30 PM. I'm thinking that we should use Apple's use of a bookmark as a giveaway as a hint about the legendary iTablet / ebook reader...

What do you think Apple should have given out to the costumed crowds last night instead of bookmarks? Leave your comments below.

[via iPhone Savior]

A few weeks ago we covered the Bookmark app, a subsystem for playing and bookmarking audio books. I was quite impressed with it, but some comments dinged it for not playing in the background when the app is closed. It also only handled audiobooks and some felt it would be more useful if it covered any audio file in your iTunes library.

SayAgain [iTunes Link] is another bookmarking app which solves both of those problems, but not nearly as well or as elegantly. It is compatible with the iPhone and iPod touch and requires iPhone OS 3.0 or later. It sells for US$1.99.

One of my pet-peeves is that many apps give you no instruction on how they work, and SayAgain is one of those. When you run it you are presented with a lined screen titled 'Annotated Media'. To the left is a + button and to the right is an edit button. Now what? Clicking on the developer link in iTunes brings you no help, only a description of what the app does. Nowhere in the app is an info button to bring some direction. But, one might say, it's intuitive. You don't need help. I say, nonsense. Everyone comes from a different level of experience and assuming intuitiveness is a bad assumption. Bookmark, on the other hand, gives full instructions and a tutorial right inside the app.

SayAgain is a generalist audio bookmarking app, allowing you to add bookmarks to any audio file in iTunes. This is quite useful since you might want to bookmark a story in podcast or even a great drum solo as well as a place in an audiobook.

There are two ways to use it. Either play something in iTunes and then run the app which will display your audio file as Now playing, along with the name of the song or file. Or you can run it without playing anything and hit the + button which brings up iTunes. Leaving the app doesn't stop the audio, a major advantage. To add a book mark you click the star (which in other apps means favorites), and you'll get a window with a keyboard and buttons to 'Set start marker' and 'Set end marker'. On top of the screen are buttons marked back and play.

Read on to see how well it worked.

Note: This tip is Leopard-only, sorry Tiger holdouts.

The Command-? trick is easily one of my favorites among the less-ballyhooed feature expansions of Leopard. If you missed that one, it allows you to search for menu items in any application by pulling down the "Help" menu, which can be triggered from the keyboard with the Command-? (Command-Shift-/) shortcut. Typing the first few letters of the menu item you're searching for will highlight its location in the dropdown menus. I use it a lot, but somehow missed one great capability noted by TUAW reader Maarten: in Safari, the menu item search extends to your bookmark collection and Safari history!

Because the bookmarks and history items are contained in the menubar's menus, they're searched along with the other menu items, allowing blazing-fast navigation of the sites listed in the Bookmarks and History menus. I like speed; I have my bookmarks toolbar set up with numbered titles which correlate to their Command-number shortcut (the first non-folder item in the toolbar can be accessed with Command-1, the second with Command-2, etc.), and I have keyword shortcuts assigned to my other most-accessed bookmarks using various tools. There's only so much room in my life, however, for organizing bookmarks and assigning keywords. History search can be a tedious prospect, too, even using Spotlight or Safari's History menu hierarchy. This trick provides instant search and it's only a keyboard shortcut away. Because the History results are sorted into sub-menus named by date, the results from the history menu appear with their access date first, so it's easy to navigate the results to find what you're looking for.

The concept behind this tip applies to all kinds of applications. I started experimenting and found that the search bar in the help menu almost always included recent documents and open windows ... basically anything the application lists in its menus. The bookmarks/history search works in most other browsers, too. I use Firefox as well as Safari, so I was happy to find it worked there, with one minor caveat: the Command-? shortcut in Firefox opens the Firefox Help webpage, not the Help menu item, requiring a mouse click to focus the search box in the dropdown. I haven't found a way to add shortcut keys for top-level menu items in System Preferences, so if anyone knows that, or another way to access the search menu via a shortcut key, I'd love to know about it.

Happy searching, and a big thanks to Maarten for the tip!

One of the most frequent questions we hear from readers on our Ask TUAW posts (and for our doting Aunt TUAW) is a simple one, with no simple answer: "How can I replace the synchronization features of MobileMe with a free service or a software package that doesn't cost me $99 a year?" We feel your pain.

For anyone looking to cut their cash outlay and maintain multi-Mac data sync, there are options for calendaring (BusySync, Google's CalDAV support) and some for address books (address-o-sync, or the free Google & Yahoo sync in Leopard's Address Book), and some products that handle both calendars and contacts (SpanningSync, Plaxo) -- but if you're in the mood for a free all-in-one approach, you may want to check out a promising beta service from a team of European developers: fruux.

Starting with address book sync in earlier versions, fruux has now progressed to include calendar, task and bookmark sync via Apple's built-in apps (Address Book, iCal & Safari) and a cloud service that stores the synchronized data. The system pref pane interface is no-frills and the product is definitely still a work in progress (there are prominent warnings to back up your data beforehand and frequently thereafter), so it may not suit your needs just yet -- but it's definitely one to watch. Future roadmap plans include an iPhone client and a web interface to your PIM data.

Thanks Dominik, Hagen & everyone who sent this in.

If you're a Del.icio.us fanactic like I am, then you have hundreds, going on thousands of bookmarks. How do you view your 1,000+ bookmarks? If you use a web browser, then you're living in the dark ages. I am going to show you a better way to view your bookmarks that may leave you speechless.

Delish is a completely new way to view your Del.icio.us bookmarks. You may ask, "What's so special about this. Can you not do this with other applications"? Well, no, because Delish is a way to view your bookmarks similar to the way you view your iPhoto images; as a matter of fact, the user interface is almost identical to that of iPhoto. When you load your bookmarks, Delish will automatically download a new snapshot of the page and use it as a thumbnail which can be enlarged for your viewing pleasure. You can also search through your bookmarks and view all of your tags in the left sidebar.

Another killer feature is reserved for those of you with one of those fancy new MacBook Pros or MacBook Airs, because you can zoom into your bookmarks by "pinching" the Multi-touch trackpad -- the very same way you can in iPhoto. The only thing missing from the application is the ability to add bookmarks directly from it, although this software is currently in beta and definitely has time to add this support later on.

Delish is currently free while in beta and can be downloaded from the Pine Point Software website.

I have an admission to make: I change browsers on a fairly regular basis (normally, I'm found swapping between Camino and Safari in short succession as I struggle to find a nirvana between the two of them). But what to do with my favourites? Some people I know like to keep browser favourites separate, but I can't stand that. If anything, I've yearned to be able to simply use the same bookmarks (and keyboard shortcuts for Bookmark-bar items) on all the browsers I possibly can.

That's where Bookit comes in handy. There's three options: Manage, Migrate or Restore. You can manually edit bookmarks, and compare them to a 'master' set (in my case, Camino); Migrate will allow you to take a browser's bookmarks, and completely over-write existing bookmarks on any other browser (or overwrite a synchronised copy of your Bookit bookmarks on .Mac), while Restore will allow you to retrieve a previous configuration. With only Safari able to synchronise bookmarks via .Mac, the ability to do so with Camino and Firefox is a welcome relief for those of use who don't (always) use the default OS X browser.

I've used Bookit on three of my Macs around the home and office, with the application working perfectly in bringing my bookmarks across to all of them. Given that the application costs just $12, if you're working with multiple browsers, favourites and machines, I'd highly recommend Bookit.

It's been a while since we've mentioned Delibar, the del.icio.us client from Shiny Frog that gives you access to all your bookmarks from the menubar, but a recent v0.9 update brings some noteworthy new features and enhancements. While you could already sort your bookmarks into nested folders based on the tags you apply to each bookmark, this new version now allows you to chose a flat tag list to sort by (meaning: bookmarks are sorted into one folder by the first tag you apply to them). Check out the other goodies in this new version:

• You can now set a global hotkey for popping up Delibar menu
• Reloading bookmark no longer prevent you from using Delibar while loading
• Delibar is a LOT faster
• Holding down ? when looking at a bookmark will reveal its actual URL
  
• Overall graphics improvement, more compact "actions" menu

Delibar is one of my favorite del.icio.us utilities and one of the apps that allowed me to stop bookmarking things in browsers altogether, which has the additional benefit of letting me use any browser I want without worrying about keeping anything in sync. Now that I can call Delibar with a hotkey and browse my del.icio.us bookmarks by typing a few keys in the Delibar list, I wish its developer offered a donation link.

Delibar is (apparently) freeware and available from Shiny Frog's website.

Camino is a great browser that exists somewhere in that place between Safari and Firefox. It's a spawn of Mozilla's darling browser, but it is decidedly far more Mac-like in its functionality and UI. Even cooler still is that Camino has plenty of tricks up its sleeve, such as the ability to add a folder of bookmarks to its Dock context menu, and turning folders into one-click tab groups.

First up: the Dock Menu option. Simply check this in the Get Info window (cmd-i) of any folder in Camino's bookmark manager and enjoy easy access to your 'marks from the comfort of a right-click.

Next is that Tab group: this is useful for creating a set of bookmarks that all open in their own tabs at a mere single click of your mouse. Do you consistently open webmail, Amazon and - of course - TUAW when you sit down for a stroll through the web? Camino's Tab group just might save you hours of clicking... after using this feature for, like, 20 years.

Striking another blow to .Mac's usefulness, SafariDepot allows bookmark synchronization over FTP and FTPS (secure FTP). It's actually a clever little app that also includes a couple of scripts that are ripe for automation through Quicksilver, Login Items, cron jobs, and more. It's also smart about downloading and replacing Safari's local bookmarks: once a download is run, it will automatically restart Safari (if it's running) and backup your local copy before replacing it with the version from your server.

SafariDepot might not have that "it just works" aura about it that .Mac Safari syncing does (since you have to roll your own automation or *gasp* run it manually), but it's certainly yet another alternative to one of .Mac's prized features.

[via MacUser]

Online bookmaking systems are all the rage these days (I certainly rely on nothing but Pukka, delibar and Quicksilver's del.icio.us plugin now), but what if, while amassing your library of 'marks, some of them go dead, are taken down or otherwise disappear? dead.licious might just be the tool for you, as it's a utility that checks each of your links to see if at least something is still there.

It isn't quite everything it could be, however, as the author lists a number of improvements already on the list:

• Support for 10.3.9 and maybe 10.2.8. E-mail me if you really, really want this tool for 10.3.9 and I'll see what I can do to expedite the process along (donations wouldn't hurt either).
• Faster checking of websites by checking several at once instead of one at a time.
• Keychain support so you don't have to type in your username and password each time.
• Determining which websites have been added since the last update and only checking those.
• Editing bookmark information and submitting the changes back to your del.icio.us account.

With this in mind, a discussion of whether dead.licious should even be called a 1.0 app could certainly be warranted, but instead of getting nit-picky over version guidelines, why not give it a whirl and submit some feedback (and a buck or two while you're at it) to show the dev you care.

I wish I had more to say about this update, like it doubles your Mac's performance or solves world hunger, but it mainly fixes login problems by updating to the new del.icio.us API. Delibar, for those scratching your heads, is what I consider the missing link of social bookmarking which actually makes your 'marks useful; it's a menubar item that provides access to all your del.icio.us bookmarks, even storing them in a folder hierarchy (the first tag is the main folder, second tag is a subfolder) and displaying tag bundles you create at the site. It's an indispensable utility in my arsenal, and if you've been having login issues like I have (Quicksilver's del.icio.us plugin can't seem to login anymore either), this 0.8.2 update should fix your issues.

Delibar is donationware and available from Whamoo.

The never-failing macosxhints.com is at it again, this time with a series of tips concerning Safari, speed and bookmark management. This tip offers a simple method for using the Finder to sort Safari's bookmarks alphabetically (hint: make sure you hit cmd + j in the Finder and enable the 'Keep arranged by name' option), while this tip points out that Safari can receive a noticeable speed boost if you organize as many of your bookmarks into folders as possible.

If you're really looking to speed up Safari, the speed boost/folder tip also contains a roundup from Rob Griffith of quite a few other macosxhints tips that can re-energize Safari's experience.

Pukka, the versatile, multi-account and light-weight del.icio.us posting client, has been updated to version 1.2. New features and fixes include:

• Pukka now uses the new SSL del.icio.us API for increased security as well as a more reliable means of storing passwords in the keychain.
• The tags field now resizes in height as necessary to accommodate all of the tags that you type.
• There is a new option to disable warning messages when resetting, closing or quitting with unposted data.
• Bug fixes and tweaks: hiding behavior, more reliable determination of successful posting, success dialog "Visit del.icio.us" button, pasting into tags field, added tooltips, smaller font in Bonjour drawer, problem with semicolon in posting fields, only attempt to use Growl when it's running

A demo of Pukka is available from Code Sorcery Workshop, and a license will cost a mere $5.

Delibar, what I consider to be the missing link of social bookmarking, has been updated as a Universal Binary. No other major new features have been added, but this is a welcome update to my favorite tool for accessing del.icio.us bookmarks from the menubar.

Delibar is donationware and available from Matteo Rattotti's site.

Menulicious is a utility like Delibar that allows you to access your del.icio.us bookmarks right from your menubar. One nice option of Menulicious is that it can display a bookmark count for each of your tags. An annoying quirk, however, is that your tags are listed under a "Tags >" menu; not directly under the utility itself.

Regardless, Menulicious is a Universal Binary, so it'll run a little faster on your Intel Mac. Menulicious is free and available either from Versiontracker or Kainjow's iPod-like website - surf to Software > Freebies > Menulicious.