A Long Road to Gimme Bar
A few weeks ago, I saw a @swissmiss post urging people to check out Gimme Bar, a do-it-all bookmarking service by FictiveKin. I’m happy to report that I’ve done my due diligence, saving you time and money, only to return to share my experiences and thoughts.
The Problem
Like many of you, I have the distinct pleasure of working on the internet. RSS, Tweets, status updates, IMs, and emails from friends and co-workers to check out this great new site, and check out how they did X. To keep some kind of record of these morsels of design, I’d often manually take a screenshots. I’d drop these screenshots into an ‘Inspiration’ folder on my desktop. Over time, this became an unwieldy act to maintain, and it prompted me to being a sojourn to find the perfect bookmarking tool.
Stops Along The Way
The following solutions all worked in their own way, but often failed due to a lack of portability, lack of customization, or lack of social features:
The Solution
Gimme Bar delivers, because it does what the others couldn’t. It allows you to add to your collection without the overhead of doing any extra work. It’s bookmarklet is superb (yes, I know they have an extension - more on that below). It allows you to select text, images, video, or grab a screenshot of the site with click of the mouse. Not only can you add content in, but it also allows you to selectively categorize the newly saved content by applying tags and insert it into a proper category. The best part is that it’s fast. No need to kick out to Terminal or drag screenshots to discreet folders. The bookmarklet does the heavy lifting.
These Are My People.
When I jumped on Gimme Bar, I saw my Twitter contacts - family, friends, and people in the industry that I’m interested in. If I like something that they’ve saved, I can save it to one of my personal collections (a grouping of saved assets under a particular theme - ie: typography, letterpress, silkscreen, etc.). If I like someone’s entire collection, I can favorite the entire collection essentially subscribing to it. Since the site launched, I often find myself browsing to see what other people are finding. Gimme Bar’s lightweight social features are implemented in the best way possible, they’re there when you need them, but they don’t get in the way.
Things That Could be Improved
While Gimme Bar delivers in just about every way imaginable, there are a few notes that I’d like to share:
- Chrome Extension When I joined, I immediately downloaded the extension, but I soon found that it’s not for everyone. With the extension installed it assumes any highlight of text or the hover over an image is a Gimme Bar action. I promptly uninstalled, and the bookmarklet saved the day.
- Discovery page doesn’t update the URL as you scroll. The problem is that should you click/tap an item, you lose your place in the content flow and have to start again should you decide to go back. I contacted the Gimme Bar support team, and @fictivetyler informed me that it was “coming soon”.
- iOS is where it’s at. The mobile site is servicable at best. I’d love to see a Pinterst-style iOS app.
- Portability How can I pull down everything that I’ve saved to Gimme Bar. I’d like to see a Facebook-style data dump option.
All in all…
I’m very happy with the way the service works. It’s solved a need that I had directly, and if you’re in a similar state of bookmarking limbo, I urge you to give Gimme Bar a spin. Either way, check out what I find interesting on Gimme Bar.
Update
Gimme Bar recently announced a pro subscription. If you’re a fan of the great things they’re doing over there (How could you not???), I urge you to check it out.
