Dewey Bookmarks : The bookmarks manager for Chrome you have been waiting for

Few days back I wrote about how you can easily search your bookmarks from Chrome omnibox. But this approach is still limited by Chrome’s Bookmark Manager. In my quest to look for an even better solution, I found Dewey. Apart from clean and elegant interface, it provides some powerful search capabilities. This could be really useful when you deal with large number of bookmarks.

Dewey. Better Bookmarks for Google Chrome.

Dewey

Launching Dewey

Before we dig deeper into Dewey, I need to state that it’s a Chrome App and NOT an Extension. The reason I stated this is that after installing the app, I kept wondering how to launch it. I didn’t see any launch button in the toolbar which is very common with Chrome extensions. Chrome no more shows Apps in the New Tab Page. Therefore, it was a bit puzzling to start with but there are a number of ways to launch it.

Once you launch it, it will load a neat and pleasant interface with a big search box and a page full of bookmark tiles. As you scroll, it will keep loading remaining bookmarks smoothly. You can sort your bookmarks by Date, Title and URL. I wish they add sort by usage frequency and make it default so that it can easily replace my New Tab Page.

Custom Tagging

The above picture shows the single tile for a bookmark as displayed by Dewey. As you can see, along with an icon and title, it displays folders under which the bookmark is stored. By default it converts all the folders into tags (the ones highlighted in yellow) for a bookmark. You also get an option to exclude/hide top-level folders (Bookmarks bar, Other bookmarks, etc.) as they do not make sense in most cases. You may also add custom tags if you want. All the tags will be stored and synced, so once created it will be available on all your machines if you’re signed into to Chrome.

Edit Bookmark

The edit icon which appears on mouse over, will allow you to edit bookmark title, url, add/remove tags or delete the bookmark altogether. Currently it does not allow you to modify the folder structure through this dialog.

Powerful Search

Coming back to search, you can start with a simple free text search. But if you need to dig, you have 3 options. You can search by tag, title or url. So if you chose to search by tag, e.g. tag:color, it will look for “color” only in tags and exclude all others. The same is true for search by title and url. Take a look at the demo below and you will understand exactly what I mean.

Open Source

It is an open source project and source code is available on GitHub if you want to take a look. You may also submit issues and feature requests there.

Conclusion

Great interface supported by keyboard navigation, ability to add custom tags which also sync across and exclusion search are the three important aspects which make this a great app. Highly recommended!