Delish Pinboard App for Mac

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Delish is a Mac app1 for managing bookmarks on the Mac. It integrates with Pinboard2 and brings some bonus features that the website lacks.

Smart Bundles

Smart Bundles are the real knock-out feature of Delish. They go beyond the standard Pinboard tag bundles. Delish Smart Bundles are similar to iTunes smart playlists and allow a user to combine many different search types into a constantly refreshing smart folder.

The smart folders have access to all of the important bookmark data for a Pinboard bookmark, which makes it easy to build some very useful collections. For example, a list of all untagged and broken bookmarks.

Page Cache

Delish burns a lot of storage and bandwidth to download the page cache for each bookmark. This makes the browsing experience much more visual than the standard Pinboard tour but comes at the cost of storage and bandwidth. I like the feature but it really kills the Delish performance. After several days of running, the app is still trying to sync and generate pages images for all of my nearly 9000 bookmarks. On the other hand, I get quick look access to every bookmark which is very handy feature when looking for the extant reference I had in mind.

Search and Offline Support

The search in Delish is very good. It’s my favorite way of looking through my bookmarks now. While the Delish Web site indicates that search integrates with Spotlight, I’ve been unable to determine how results should show up. (CORRECTION: search for kind:delish works in spotlight. A help section in Delish is badly needed.)

Since Delish has downloaded about 6GB of my bookmarks, I get offline access to everything. I’ve tested it, but had very little use for it. I could imagine that this would be wonderful while traveling since my Pinboard contains a lot of my reference material.

Editing

The editing experience is very basic but that’s as it should be. I’ve configured Delish to open a bookmark for editing after double click, rather than launch the bookmark. This, combined with the Smart Bundles makes editing a very nice alternative to the Pinboard webpage.

Problems

The biggest problem I have with Delish is the performance of sync and download. I realize 9000 bookmarks might be a lot more than is typical, but the first 2000 took several hours to sync and download the pages.

As mentioned previously, the Spotlight search did not work for me. I’d love quick access to my bookmarks through spotlight. Right now, however, the app performs search adequately.

I’d like it if the Delish search supported keywords directly, for example “tag:python”. This would give me a bit more instant precision when doing a search.

Conclusion

I like Delish and can honestly recommend it to any Pinboard fanatic. It provides a nice experience. With some performance boosts and some additional features. The Smart Bundles alone are worth $15.

Delish | Mac | $15

  1. I found it by way of the comments on my Pinboard for Nerds post. I guess comments aren’t all bad. ↩︎

  2. I assume it works with Delicious bookmarks too. They’re still around, right? ↩︎