Showing its age

I owned URL Manager Pro from version 1 in the late ‘90s, and remember it as a very useful utility.

These days we have sync services like XMarks to help manage our bookmarks, but as I seem to keep running into sync conflicts, I gave this new version of an old friend a fresh try.

First tiny problems:
Why on earth are there “Fonts” and “Finder” buttons in the toolbar? I’m not going to change the fonts of my URLs, and finding the Finder is not a problem.
The black-and-white menu bar icon is simply ugly.

Second, the interface just feels old. Anachronisms include:
Instead of a modern interface with a search field in the toolbar, searches open in a drawer that’s giving me Panther flashbacks.
I’m supposed to select my HTML editor based upon its nostalgic creator code.

But those are all minor issues. The critical problem is that Japanese text (whether imported or manually edited) is immediately mangled into gobbledegook, in a way that I dimly recall from the pre-Unicode bad old days of Mac OS 9. Changing the font has no effect. I haven’t seen that in years — how can that even happen on a modern OS?

Whatever the reason, this last problem makes URL Manager Pro 4 useless to me in its current state. Hoping for updates.

In the meantime, it’s back to XMarks’ dodgy syncing.

プレス about URL Manager Pro