Featuring Bookmarks, the app that organizes your favorite bookmarks into folders, by Marcel Klehr

Post date

April 12, 2022

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Author

Mikaela Schneider

Do you like to bookmark your favorite web pages, videos, and more for later? Many would say yes, but how do you keep them all organized? The solution: the Nextcloud App Bookmarks!

Bookmarks sorts all of your favorite and most important bookmarks into folders, so that you can stay organized and at the same time, have your data in your own hands.

Bookmarks app screenshot

The app was first developed by Arthur Schiwon more than a decade ago for his previous employer Mr. Wong, as bookmarking services like the discontinued del.icio.us were very popular at the time. Over time, the idea was taken over by Marcel Klehr who finished developing the app for Nextcloud! Today, we have interviewed him about it. Arthur gives him full credibility, stating that Marcel created a beautiful swan from the ugly duckling of its beginnings. Have a read about his story behind the app, his experiences, and future ideas!

Nextcloud: Tell us about yourself!

Marcel: I'm a university student in the field of Cognitive Science, a mixture between Computer Science, Neuropsychology, and Philosophy, among other fields. I love how interdisciplinary my studies are and am happy to be able to pursue a variety of interests, like making music and developing open source software on the side.

Why did you develop this app and why did you publish it?

The Bookmarks app was originally developed by Arthur Schiwon and came into my radar when I was looking for an open source, ideally self-hosted, approach to synchronizing bookmarks a few years ago. Countless hours of work and several years later you can sync bookmarks between most available browsers using Nextcloud Bookmarks and the Floccus browser extension I built.

How was the development experience?

Developing a Nextcloud app was a natural choice since I love the ecosystem and the possibility of interaction between all the apps within the Nextcloud framework. In recent years the development experience has improved drastically, with the move towards Vue.js and readily available user interface components, extensive developer documentation, and ways to easily reach core developers that are happy to lend a helping hand when they can.

Have you had any feedback from the community?

I like to offer regular user surveys for people to give feedback. There is the occasional frustrated user complaining of bugs or a malfunction, however the majority seem to be quite happy with syncing their bookmarks via Nextcloud Bookmarks and Floccus.

What are your plans for the future?

Currently I'm focusing on the Floccus Android app, which allows access to one's bookmarks on Android. Beyond that, I may venture into creating an iOS app if there's demand for it.

Are there any other apps you have developed or are currently working on?

Indeed. I've been working on Recognize, a smart media tagging solution that scans photos for faces, landmarks, and objects like cars or food and makes this content available for other apps as tags. The latest release also supports categorizing audio files into musical genres.

In apps like photos or audioplayer, you can then explore your collections based on the smart tags and for example, find all photos of your cat or all photos of your partner.