What's new in Bookdog 5.3.21
Jul 27, 2012
- The only change is that this version is signed with our Developer ID, so that it can be installed in Mac OS X 10.8, Mountain Lion. Users who already have BookMacster 5.3.20 installed and working may skip this update, even if they update to Mountain Lion. It is only needed if Bookdog is re-installed after Mountain Lion.
New in Bookdog 5.3.20 (Dec 2, 2011)
- Detects if iCloud is syncing Safari bookmarks when user attempts to open them, and if so issues a warning with a link to more information.
New in Bookdog 5.3.19 (Oct 21, 2011)
- Has only one change, to support Opera. If you have no plans to use Bookdog with Opera, you should skip this update.
- Now supports recent Opera versions, and probably future versions of Opera yet to be released. (Now uses the same smarter search algorithm for finding Opera bookmarks as our newer app, BookMacster does.)
New in Bookdog 5.3.18 (Sep 21, 2011)
- Updated method for logging into Google, to open or save Google Bookmarks, so that it is much more likely to work, particularly for Google accounts which have been upgraded to Google+ (Plus). (For early adopters, this version contains a further update beyond what was in the 5.3.17 beta.)
- Now indicates an error if saving Google Bookmarks failed because Safari was logged into the wrong Google account, and Bookdog received a CAPTCHA challenge. (ditto for 5.3.17 early adopters)
- When running Verify, now sends the User-Agent string of Safari 5.1, instead of its own User-Agent string. This is so that some sites, notably facebook.com and capitalone.com, will not incorrectly assume that BookMacster is a mobile app and respond with a permananent redirect to their m subdomain, for example “m.facebook.com”. Such subdomains send minimal web pages appropriate for mobile devices with small screens.
New in Bookdog 5.3.16 (Jun 6, 2011)
- Now works properly in Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion).
New in Bookdog 5.3.15 (Jan 24, 2011)
- Now works with Firefox version 4. Labels, references and titles which were "Firefox 3" are now simply "Firefox".
New in Bookdog 5.3.13 (Apr 19, 2010)
- Now compatible with Opera 10.5 beta. (When opening Opera bookmarks, Bookdog now looks for various Opera bookmarks files back through Opera 9, and chooses the one which has been modified most recently.)
New in Bookdog 5.3.12 (Mar 27, 2010)
- This update is important for anyone using Bookdog with tags in Firefox bookmarks:
- Fixed a bug which causes old tags to be duplicated when saving Firefox 3 bookmarks.
- |In checking status of the Bookwatchdog Login Item which occurs when launching Bookdog, no longer issues a warning when it is necessary to restart an unresponsive System Events process, and no longer issues a warning if a restarted System Events process is still unresponsive.
New in Bookdog 5.3.11 (Mar 2, 2010)
- Updated Google Bookmarks protocol to reflect changes at Google. At the present time, at least in California, depending on the nature of the bookmarks change(s), users of prior Bookdog versions will encounter either HTTP Error 502, or a silent failure, when saving to Google Bookmarks.
- Made it less likely that Bookwatchdog might sort bookmarks unnecessarily. (Added a margin of 0.25 seconds weight to the “No” side when Bookwatchdog compares the time the filesystem said it wrote the file to the time that Bookdog or Bookwatchdog completed sorting.)
New in Bookdog 5.3.10 (Feb 4, 2010)
- Fixed Google Bookmarks login which was recently broken when Google added a ‘GALX’ parameter to their login protocol. (Most Google Bookmarks users, with only one Google account, to which they are almost always logged in, would probably not have noticed this problem.
- In Preferences > Application, added a popup menu to set the number of recent Firefox bookmarks files which are backed up in ~/Library/Application Support/Bookdog/Firefox 3 Backups. The number had previously been fixed at 32. The new default setting is 16.
- When analyzing for duplicates, now distinguishes between URLs with different fragment identifiers.
- Fixed a crash which would occur while Analyzing for Duplicates if bookmarks contained a corrupt bookmark with an undefined “host” portion.
- Fixed a bug which caused renewal of an old eSellerate License Key to fail if user accidentally entered a tab character following their Licensee Name.
- Mac OS 10.3 users should not install this update.
New in Bookdog 5.3.8 (Nov 4, 2009)
- This update fixes issues for anyone using Bookwatchdog, Firefox users that have more than a hundred or so tags, and Google Bookmarks users.
- Fixed bug which could cause unnecessary sorting (and barking, if enabled) by Bookwatchdog.
- Improved efficiency in the "Comparing tags" phase during re-saving of Firefox 3 bookmarks. With thousands of bookmarks and thousands of tags, on a typical Core 2 Duo Mac, previous versions would request more memory than the system will give and need to be force quit. Now, the operation completes in a few seconds.
- Fixed a bug introduced in 5.3.5 which could cause the progress spinner to remain spinning and dirty dot in the window close box to remain dirty after successful save (upload) of Google Bookmarks.
- When user attempts a 'Save As' operation with Firefox 3 bookmarks, now displays a dialog explaining how this can be done, instead of failing silently.
New in Bookdog 5.3.6 (Aug 27, 2009)
- Operation of Verify has been changed to accomodate sudden dropping of all connections which has been seen increasingly in recent months in some users' internet services, apparently triggered by a minute or more of rapidly visiting websites. Bookdog now observes the frequency of dropped connections and adjusts its request rate accordingly. Also, fewer requests are allowed to be outstanding, so that there will be fewer in the pipeline if it is dropped. These changes reduce the number of retests required, resulting in higher accuracy and reduced total test time under these adverse circumstances.
- Now compatible with Opera 9, Opera 10 Beta, and Opera 10 RC1. This update is required for users updating to Opera 10 RC1 now, or Opera 10 Final after Sept 1. (When opening Opera bookmarks, Bookdog now uses whichever of the three corresponding Opera bookmarks files has been modified most recently.)
New in Bookdog 5.3.5 (Aug 25, 2009)
- Restored the capability for Bookwatchdog and Bookdog to process and save Safari bookmarks while Safari is running. (This capability had been disabled in Bookdog 5.1.46, but measures have now been implemented to make this operation safe with Safari version 4.x)
- Fixed an issue which caused the "Bookdog" application name to be instead a blank space in the application menu when running under Mac OS 10.6 ("Snow Leopard").
- Removed the alert dialog which occurs when launching Bookdog if System Events fails to complete Bookdog's verification that Bookwatchdog is or is not a login item.
- Reduced the memory footprint required by Bookwatchdog after repeated sort operations.
- The Alert dialog which appears during Verify when Bookdog finds that a computer is not connected to the internet now gives additional information and recovery options.
- The BookdogMigrationPerformer, which is what does the work when a migration is scheduled using the Bookdog Migration Scheduler, has been improved so that it will quit Bookdog reliably on all Macs.
- Fixed an issue which caused warnings "class implementation" warnings to be logged when launching under Mac OS 10.6 ("Snow Leopard").
New in Bookdog 5.3.3 (Jun 15, 2009)
- Fixed an omission in the 5.3.2 beta: Now automatically supports Opera 10 for those Opera 10 users who never used Opera 9.
- Fixed a bug in the Migrate Bilaterally action which caused AppleScript to display a dialog if either end of the migration was Firefox.
New in Bookdog 5.3.2 Beta (Jun 15, 2009)
- Added an option for switching from Opera 9 to Opera 10. (After Opera 10 has been run once, a dialog will appear the next time you launch Bookdog.)
- Clicking "Add New..." in the Main Window now creates a new item in the expected location, under the current selection, instead of in an unexpected location.
- Fixed a bug which sometimes allowed Bookwatchdog to sort bookmarks while Bookdog was running, causing confusion to the user.
New in Bookdog 5.2.1 (Apr 13, 2009)
- Fixed a bug which, during a Migration, could cause folders to assume the order of the opposite browser instead of the one indicated as favored. This is especially noticeable in doing a bilateral migration, because in this case the destination is favored in each direction.
New in Bookdog 5.3.1 Beta (Apr 13, 2009)
- Fixed a bug and restored a missing file in the package which caused Bookdog to crash if one attempted to "Make license available to all users on this computer".
- Fixed a bug which caused a Main Window showing Firefox 3, del.icio.us or Google Bookmarks to not close after clicking File > Close followed by File > Save.
New in Bookdog 5.3.0 Beta (Apr 13, 2009)
- Fixed a bug which, during a Migration, could cause folders to assume the order of the opposite browser instead of the one indicated as favored. This is especially noticeable in doing a bilateral migration, because in this case the destination is favored in each direction.
- Fixed the Search Key popup menu in the More sub-panel of the Find window.
- Fixed a bug (again) which was causing occasional crashes when a main window was closed. One way to trigger this crash was to copy an item, paste in the copy, sort bookmarks, and then delete the pasted item before closing the window.
- Fixed a bug which caused Bookdog to sometimes say that bookmarks were not sorted when in fact they were sorted. One way to trigger this was to add a duplicate bookmark in a browser which Bookwatchdog was set to sort and find duplicates in, trigger Bookwatchdog, then after the Bookdog launched, delete the duplicate and save the bookmarks.
- Fixed a bug in the Migrate Bilaterally Automator action.
- In the Bookdog Migration Performer AppleScript which is included in the application package to do the work scheduled by Bookdog Migration Scheduler, added a more informative error dialog to explain if the Bookdog/Daily Migrations folder in the user's Application Support disappears for some reason.
New in Bookdog 5.2 (Mar 10, 2009)
- The Bookwatchdog feature to sort Safari bookmarks minutes after a bookmarks change, and the ability to save Safari bookmarks while Safari is running, have been removed because they will cause the Safari version 4 Public Beta to crash if the user is editing bookmarks in Safari at the same time. Sorting and saving Safari bookmarks is now deferred until after Safari has been quit, same as with Camino, Firefox and the other browsers. See our blog post for more details.
- When opening Firefox 3 bookmarks, if more than one bookmark has the same URL, but these bookmarks have different tags, their tags are now pooled and copied to all other bookmarks with this URL, so that all the bookmarks with the same URL have all the same tags. The reason for the change is because this is the way Firefox 3 does it.
- Fixed a bug which caused Bookdog to sometimes save bookmarks after user chose to leave browser running and clicked "Cancel".
- Now reads/writes Firefox 3 bookmarks which have corrupt, "null" bookmarks when the bookmark in Bookdog also has no URL; no longer aborts the process because of "SQL Error 1".
- Fixed a bug which would cause Bookdog to crash if item(s) from a window were copied to the clipboard, and then the window from which they were copied was closed. This bug was introduced while fixing a related crashing problem in Bookdog 5.1.39.
New in Bookdog 5.1.44 (Feb 11, 2009)
- In "File" menu, added a "Delete" command for any Firefox 2 bookmarks profile which has been obsoleted by a Firefox 3 bookmarks profile. This allows users to handily expose old Firefox 2 bookmarks files, so that these files can be trashed, securely deleted or archived instead of lying around and causing confusion.
- Now handles Firefox 3 bookmarks with corrupt, "null" bookmarks.
- In Main Window, the width of the first column in the outline is now fixed so that scroll bars no longer appear when expanding the most-expanded item.
- Removed some extraneous Access Control Entries (ACE) in the Access Control Lists (ACL) of three files (AmpEscapes.plist, Bookdog.icns and BookdogBark.aiff) in Bookdog's Contents/Resources. These would sometimes cause disk backup operations to fail, particularly when using Carbon Copy Cloner. Thanks to the user who reported this and to MacWizard Hal Itosis for publishing over on MacFixit the beautiful homeACLtool for cleaning up bad ACLs which we used to fix our source files. (If interested, see Hal's revision in the later post, dated 2008 June 17.)
New in Bookdog 5.1.41 (Jan 4, 2009)
- Bookdog no longer hides the Smart Bookmarks ("Most Visited", "Recent Tags", etc.) in Firefox 3. This also fixes a bug which under some conditions caused these Smart Bookmarks to be moved by one or two positions when saving bookmarks to Firefox 3.
- Whenever a non-bookmark is among the selection in Firefox 3, the 'tag' field is now disabled. (Previous behavior allowed tags to be added to non-bookmarks, which made the document subsequently un-save-able.)
- Fixed bug in Bookdog's generic multi-purpose Alert window which sometimes caused text to be misplaced or clipped out of view.
- Added additional measures to prevent crashes when closing a bookmarks document.
- Fixed bug which could cause a crash when executing the Help menu item "Find browsers in Great Detail".
- Added better error reporting if cannot write bookmarks files for some reason.
New in Bookdog 5.1.36 (Oct 22, 2008)
- Fixed slow performance and large memory usage which occured while opening or, more likely, saving a file containing thousands of bookmarks with special properties unsupported by the web browser to which the bookmarks are being saved, but supported by Bookdog. Ah, life can be so complicated. Here is a typical case of how this could occur: User has thousands of Firefox bookmarks, and many of them have "Description" annotations. (User may not even be aware of this because, at some time in the distant past, user may have run some Firefox extension which automatically downloads descriptions from sites and adds them to bookmarks.) User then commands Bookdog to migrate these Firefox bookmarks to Safari, then saves the migrated Safari bookmarks which now have all these descriptions. Descriptions are not supported by Safari but are supported by Bookdog. Bookdog now saves the descriptions as special properties. In previous versions, this could cause a major slowdown, but in 5.1.36 it does not.
- After migration, the results dialog now informs user that bookmarks must be 'saved', and also brings the relevant bookmarks document window(s) to the front.
New in Bookdog 5.1.32 (Sep 17, 2008)
- Fixed crashes when saving some OmniWeb bookmarks, also bug affecting older "G3" Macs.
- Fixed two bugs which could cause a crash or hang while saving OmniWeb bookmarks.
- Fixed a build setting which caused recent versions, probably starting with 5.1.26, to fail to load Firefox 3, Shiira or del.icio.us bookmarks on older Macs with PowerPC G3 processors.
- Updated the Sparkle Updater, used in "Check for Updates", to version 1.5.
New in Bookdog 5.1.26 (Sep 3, 2008)
- Now allows duplicate bookmarks when saving to Firefox 3. This is thanks to the astute observation of a user who noted that, although Firefox 3 silently deletes the older bookmark when you create a new one using "Bookmark this Page", it does allow you to create duplicates in its Organize Bookmarks page using copy and paste.
- Now supports scheduling migrations using a new AppleScript, Bookdog Migration scheduler, which uses launchd, as an alternative to scheduling Automator workflows as iCal Plug-Ins. For info see the revised documentation on this subject.
- The Automator Action Migrate Unilaterally now has controls to edit the create folders from tags and add parent names as tags properties of a migration document. These new properties are significant in migrations involving Firefox 3.
- The Automator Actions Migrate Unilaterally and Migrate Bilaterally now quit the source and destination browsers if necessary before performing their migration. (Quitting is necessary for all browsers except Safari.)
- In menu > File > My Macintosh Account, the browsers listed have now been checked for existence of a bookmarks file exists instead of just existence of browser application. In particular, if Firefox 3 users now delete their 'bookmarks.html' file produced by Firefox 2, Firefox 2 will no longer be listed in this menu. (If you would like to do this, open your Firefox 2 bookmarks in Bookdog, then click in the menu File > Document Information, read the File Path, activate Finder and delete the file at this File Path, then close the document in Bookdog without saving.)
- Fixed a bug which could cause Bookdog to hang when performing a "Save As..." operation with OmniWeb bookmarks.
- Fixed a bug which caused Bookdog to hang instead of issuing a warning after finding over 32,768 duplicate pair combinations.
- Removed some extraneous Access Control Entries (ACE) in the Access Control Lists (ACL) of two files (AmpEscapes.plist and BookdogBark.aiff) in Bookdog's Contents/Resources. These would sometimes cause disk backup operations to fail, particularly when using Carbon Copy Cloner.
New in Bookdog 5.1.23 (Jul 12, 2008)
- While downloading Google Bookmarks, now checks to see if Google has served Bookdog the same bookmark more than once and now ignores the redundant data instead of placing duplicates into the outline. We don't know if this behavior by Google is rare, or if it is new, but one user reported it two days ago and thanks to his running a little test for us we were able to identify the multiple serving of bookmarks as the problem. (Note: This can result a bookmark record being deleted if user deletes one of the two redundant bookmarks, since both actually represent the same bookmark.)
- Fixed the "Fixed by Bookdog" menu item so it does not say "Fixed by %0".
- A few corrections to Italian localization.
- Added a little in Bookdog Basics documentation section.
New in Bookdog 5.1.21 (Jun 27, 2008)
- A couple of Firefox 3 users reported that Bookdog would hang when saving Firefox 3 bookmarks. This was found to be triggered by corrupt bookmark record(s) in their Firefox 3 databases that had NULL values for 'title', 'url' and/or 'keyword'. Bookdog 5.1.21 now handles these oddities and updates such values without hanging. (By the way, if Firefox 3 sees such a corrupt bookmark record when it launches, it silently restores that bookmark record from a .json file in the profile's bookmarkbackups directory. If such a record cannot be found, it silently deletes all bookmarks and reverts to the factory-default bookmarks set.)
- Fixed a bug which caused the Fix Duplicates window to sometimes not close automatically after the last duplicate had been disposed of.
- Fixed two bugs which caused the Fix Broken Bookmarks window to sometimes not close automatically after the last broken bookmark had been disposed of, and to continue to show the last broken bookmarks even if it had been deleted.
New in Bookdog 5.1.20 (Jun 12, 2008)
- Fixed a bug which caused could cause forgetting of Bookdog-only attributes (False Alarm, Duplicate Allowed, Folder Unsorted, etc.) in Opera bookmarks. (A warning dialog appeared when this happened.)
- Fixed a memory leak which occurred when saving Opera bookmarks in Bookdog or Bookwatchdog. (With a typical collection of 1000 Opera bookmarks, about 500 KB were leaked with each save.)
- Fixed bug which caused a warning to print to Console if a non-text attribute was edited in the Inspector while an entry in a Main Window's outline view was still active for editing. The warning was: "NSOutlineView Warning: reloadData called while in the middle of doing a reloadData!"
New in Bookdog 5.1.19 (Jun 9, 2008)
- Now able to create empty Firefox 3 bookmarks documents from scratch (using File > New Empty Bookmarks Document).
- Fixed bug which can cause crash when clicking button to demonstrate the showing of duplicates by Bookwatchdog in Preferences > Bookwatchdog.
- Fixed text label for default browser in Preferences > View, last column heading.
- When hitting cmd upArrow or cmd downArrow, if nudging the selection is not allowed, now produces a system alert beep instead of changing the selection. This affects only operation in Mac OS 10.5. The reaction in Mac OS 10.4 has always been, and continues to be, a beep.
New in Bookdog 5.1.17 (May 31, 2008)
- Fixed a bug in version 5.1.15 which caused Bookdog's Built-In Help to not work on some systems.
New in Bookdog 5.1.15 (May 30, 2008)
- Changes affecting operation with Firefox 3: In accordance with recent changes to Firefox 3, no longer allows loose items to be moved, copied, dropped or migrated to the root "All Bookmarks" level. This change is important because Firefox 3 RC1 (release candidate 1) will delete any loose items it finds in "All Bookmarks". Regarding bookmarks copied to the "Unsorted Bookmarks" collection during a migration, duplicates in this collection are now deleted as they should be if "Avoid creating duplicate bookmarks" was selected. These are now counted in the reported number of bookmarks copied.
- Recovery from and presentation of errors encountered while saving has been made more reliable, particularly if a URL which is too long for the database is encountered. (This can occur with some "data:" scheme URLs, for example, if an attempt is made to store a multi-megabyte pdf file in a bookmark as some people are now doing.)
- Two improvements have been made to Bookdog's Automator actions "Migrate Unilaterally" and "Migrate Bilaterally"
- The actions no longer quit Bookdog when they are finished working. This change was made because it has been found that Apple's Automator sometimes fails to re-launch Bookdog if the user places these actions consecutively in a workflow, such as is done when one wants to achieve synchronization among bookmarks of three browsers. The failure was poorly indicated by "the action has failed", with a "Connection Invalid" -609 error if you looked deeper.
- If Bookdog is quit for some reason while an action is present in a workflow, the values of the popup menus which select source and destination bookmarks documents are no longer set back to default values.
- Fixed a bug which caused two bad behaviors which occurred during a 'save bookmarks document' command initiated by AppleScript or an Automator action, if the document's browser or service does not allow duplicate bookmarks, such as Firefox 3, Google, or del.icio.us, and if there were duplicate bookmarks to be deleted: Bookdog would return to the scripter before the save operation was complete. The dialog asking if it was OK to delete the duplicates would appear, interrupting execution of the script.
- Creating a new item while viewing hierarchical bookmarks in flat mode now places the new item at the root level, or as near to the root level allowed by the browser or service, instead of in the hierarchy (which is not visible) adjacent to the selected item.
New in Bookdog 5.1.12 (Apr 24, 2008)
- Now supports opening Firefox 3 bookmarks which are located on other networked Macs. (As with other browsers, click in the menu File > Other Macintosh Account.)
New in Bookdog 5.1.11 (Apr 22, 2008)
- Fixed an issue which caused a bookmark change to be not registered by Google in some cases, for example, if the only change was to delete a label(s). It is possible that this issue appeared recently due to a change by Google.
- Fixed a genuine bug which caused the same problem, but in more cases, in Mac OS 10.3.
- In Inspector window, fixed the label on the "Labels" field of a Google bookmark and on the "Tags" field of a del.iciou.us bookmark.
New in Bookdog 5.1.9 (Apr 7, 2008)
- Fixed a recently-introduced bug which caused many AppleScript and Automator actions to fail in Mac OS 10.3 or 10.4. Operation in Mac OS 10.5 (Leopard) was not affected.
- In Inspector window, when displaying a Firefox 3 bookmarks, changed colors of labels for "Tags" and "Visit Count" to correctly indicate that Firefox 3 does indeed support these attributes.
New in Bookdog 5.1.8 (Mar 31, 2008)
- Fixed a bug in 5.1.6 which caused bookmarks to not always be copied when performing a migration, drag or paste to Firefox 2 or Netscape.