Hallon first came out last year some time, and I know I downloaded it because I'm only now getting around to looking at it again. I had made a couple of bookmarks--one in iTunes and one in the Finder--but decided I needed more time to really see what it could do. In the meantime, a year and a couple of versions have past, and I looked at Hallon again this evening. All I can say is, "Wow!"
Hallon asks the seriously thought-provoking question, "Wouldn't it be great if I could bookmark all of my apps like I can my browser?" And you're probably thinking, as I did last year, "Huh?"
See, for one thing Hallon's concept of bookmarking is much bigger than Safari's. To Hallon, a bookmark can be a song in iTunes, an email in Mail, a folder in the Finder, a photo album in iPhoto, a particular terminal script, etc. And each of these bookmarks can have a "Reminder" associated with it... an alarm of sorts that can be set at a user-configurable future date. Thus, Hallon becomes a help in project management.
Suppose you're working on a particular iPhoto book project and need to quit. With Hallon, which by the way lives very conveniently in the menubar, you just make a bookmark (either with the menubar item or a keyboard shortcut). If you so desire, you can add a reminder so you won't forget when you'd like to resume work on the project. On the specified date and in the specified way, Hallon will alert you to the project.
All of your Hallon bookmarks also reside in the menubar item, and you just select the iPhoto bookmark... Up pops iPhoto at the exact spot you left off!
This is really too cool for words, and like so many great Cocoa apps these days, it's free thanks to a generous open-source license. (The author, Peter Borg, is responsible for two other great open source Cocoa projects I'll be writing about later.) Hallon comes preconfigured to set bookmarks in Address Book, Finder, iPhoto, iTunes, Mail, Safari, and Terminal, and it uses a simple Applescript API so you can write your own interface for other apps. Already, users have provided for download Hallon plugins for Firefox, Entourage, Camino, BibDesk, and Shiira.
So let's get out there and start bookmarking!
P.S. "Hallon" is the Swedish word for raspberry.
