What are Bookmarks?

When surfing in the Internet you'll probably find many interesting web sites which you want to revisit later. Using the Bookmarks feature of iCab you can save the addresses of these web sites so you can easily and comfortably open them again any time.

All the web pages that are saved as Bookmark can be accessed from within the Bookmarks menu. Using the menu item Bookmarks > Manage Bookmarks iCab will open a window where all the bookmarks are located and where you can create new bookmarks, delete bookmarks, organize the bookmarks within folders and subfolders, rename and sort bookmarks etc.

Normal bookmarks represent single web site. But there is also a special type of bookmark which is called Tab Group which can be used to save any number of web sites which are displayed as Tabs in a window. This can be useful to save a group of related web sites as a unit which can all be opened at the same time with a single mouse click as Tabs.

Creating bookmarks

If you want to save a web page that is currently displayed in a browser window as bookmark, you can do this in the following ways:

The Bookmarks Window

In the Bookmarks window (selecting the menu item Bookmarks > Manage Bookmarks or clicking the Bookmarks button in the browser toolbar) you can manage all your bookmarks, create, delete, edit reorder, sort bookmarks etc.

You can create folders in the bookmarks window, to group bookmarks by topic. You can also create folders within folders, so you can create a complex folder hierarchy. In the Bookmarks menu all the folders are displayed as submenus. To creating a folder click the Folder button in the toolbar of the bookmarks window or choose the menu item "Create new Folder" from the contextual menu. The new folder will be created just above the currently selected item in the window.

Double-clicking a folder in the bookmarks window will open this folder in a new window. This makes it easy if you want to move bookmarks from one folder into another, because you can have both folders in separate windows so you can drag and drop the bookmarks without the need to scroll.

To sort the bookmarks alphabetically, just click the column header buttons at the top of the bookmarks window. This will sort the items in the current folder. Subfolders won't be sorted, you can sort them by opening the folder in a new window first and click the column header in this window.

You can also use drag & drop to reorder bookmark items in the bookmarks window.

Each modification (deleting items, creating items sorting, reordering etc.) in the bookmarks window can be undone. Just select the menu item "Edit > Undo".

There are several ways to edit the data of a bookmark. You can select the bookmark you want to edit and then click the Information button in the toolbar of the window (or select the menu item Edit > Information). This will open a dialog box where you can edit all the data of the selected bookmark. But you can also edit the URL, title and description inline directly in the bookmarks list of the bookmarks window. To do this first select the bookmark, wait a short time and then click again on the title, URL or description which will then activate the inline editing feature.

Double-clicking a bookmark will open it in the browser window. Holding down the Cmd, Option and/or Shift keys while double-clicking a bookmark will open it in a new window or a new Tab in the background or foreground. The shortcuts that are currently used depend on the Tabs settings in the preferences dialog, so have a look at these settings (Preferences dialog > General > Tabs) to find out which shortcut has which meaning.

In the contextual menu of the bookmarks window there's a submenu "Show" where all the columns are listed that are visible in the bookmarks window (URL, last modified, last checked, etc.). Setting or removing the check marks for these menu items will also show or hide the column in the window. So you can easily hide all the columns you are not interested in.

The Favorites Toolbar

In the Bookmarks window you can configure a certain folder as Favorites folder where you can store the bookmarks which are most important for you. The bookmarks in the Favorites folder are treated in a special way: these bookmarks are displayed in the Favorites toolbar directly in each browser window. So to open these bookmarks you only need a click in the browser window, while to open all the other bookmarks you would need to go to the bookmarks menu first.

To change the folder that should be used for the Favorites toolbar, you only need to select the folder in the bookmarks window and then click the "Set Favorites" button in the toolbar (or using the contextual menu). Then this folder will be used for the Favorites toolbar. The folder icon in the bookmarks window will also change to indicate which folder is currently used for the Favorites. In case you haven't selected a folder but a normal bookmark when you click on the "Set Favorites" button, iCab will select the folder where this bookmarks is located as Favorites button.

Import & Export

iCab is able to import the bookmarks from most other web browsers. If you have used another web browser before, you can easily import the bookmarks from this browser in iCab. To import bookmarks, just select the menu item "Bookmarks > Import". iCab will then open a dialog box where all the bookmarks from other browsers are listed which could be found on the hard disk. You'll only need to select the browser from which you want to import the bookmarks. In case you have exported a bookmarks file from another browser you can also select this file directly by clicking the Choose file button.

It's also possible to export bookmarks using the menu item "Bookmarks > Export". iCab will save the bookmarks in a file and will use the Netscape Bookmarks file format which is supported by most browsers when importing bookmarks. You can even export only a certain folder of bookmarks instead of exporting all bookmarks. To do this you need to open this folder in a new window and then select the Export menu item.

Check Bookmarks

iCab is able to check if the bookmarked web page has changed or is updated, so you can see if there's new content available on the web page. To do this, iCab will ask the server when the web page was modified the last time. If the date of the last modification has changed, iCab marks this page as modified which is indicated in the icon that is displayed in front of each bookmark. If there's an exclamation mark displayed in the icon, the page has changed, if a question mark is displayed in the icon, the page could not be checked because of an error (the server could be down or the page doesn't exist anymore). In the bookmarks window you can also see the exact date of the last modification in the "last modified" column. The column "last checked" will display the date when the page was checked the last time.

Checking the bookmarks can be done manually but also automatically. This can be configured individually for each bookmark. So you can have some bookmarks which will be never checked, some which will be checked only manually and some which will be checked automatically.

To start checking the bookmarks and to configure the checking you can do the following:

Preferences for the Bookmarks

In the Bookmarks settings of the Preferences dialog you can configure the default settings for the check bookmarks feature. Here you can configure if, how and when bookmarks will be checked and these default settings will be used for each new bookmarks that is created.

When using iCab on more than one computer you can use a WebDAV server to synchronize the bookmarks on all these Macs. If this feature is active iCab will save the bookmarks not only local on the hard disk of the computer (as usual) but also on the WebDAV server whenever the bookmarks are changed. When launching iCab, it will check if the bookmarks on the server are newer then the local copy of the bookmarks and will load the bookmarks from the server if this is the case. To configure the synchronization it's only necessary to enter the URL of the WebDAV server where iCab should save the bookmarks. This must be the complete URL to the (existing) folder on the server. For example "http://www.domain.tld:81/folder/" would tell iCab to save the Bookmarks in the folder "folder" on the Server "www.domain.tld". It's also possible to change the default file name which is used by iCab to save the bookmarks on the server, but the default filename should be usually fine.

The result of a check is displayed in the bookmarks icon. In the preferences you can tell iCab how long iCab should display these special markers in these icons.