Working AroundIf I lived in "Google-land", I could use Google Bookmarks. But I don't and had to look for alternatives. After some searching I found a possible way to import bookmarks:
- Upload your single html file of exported bookmarks to a document on Google Docs.
- In your browser navigate to said page.
- Manually click on each link and save as bookmark.
import the bookmarks directly into the browser's database. That would be cool. But I'm not bold enough to root my new phone and "play with that, probably break it a bit - and then cry about it later." (Ward from androidcommunity.com)
My Solution
On several places I read hints that some Android apps were able to import bookmarks, but I couldn't find any. Instead I found Matthieu Guenebaud's Bookmarks Manager. It's able to backup and restore the browser bookmarks and uses a plain zip file to store them.
Viewing .ZIP: Bookmarks_2010-09-10_14-11-24.zip Length Method Size Ratio Date Time Name ------ ------ ----- ----- ---- ---- ---- 2273 DeflatN 710 68.8% 09.10.2010 2:11p bookmarks.xml 526 DeflatN 531 0.0% 09.10.2010 2:11p 23.png 764 DeflatN 769 0.0% 09.10.2010 2:11p 24.png 326 DeflatN 331 0.0% 09.10.2010 2:11p 51.png 684 DeflatN 689 0.0% 09.10.2010 2:11p 57.png 239 DeflatN 238 0.5% 09.10.2010 2:11p 69.png 541 DeflatN 546 0.0% 09.10.2010 2:11p 90.png 1266 DeflatN 1271 0.0% 09.10.2010 2:11p 198.png 490 DeflatN 495 0.0% 09.10.2010 2:11p 164.png 304 DeflatN 309 0.0% 09.10.2010 2:11p 124.png 408 DeflatN 413 0.0% 09.10.2010 2:11p 229.png ------ ----- ----- ---- 7821 6302 19.5% 11The file
bookmarks.xml has a simple XML structure of <bookmark>s inside a <bookmarks> element. Yes, that's something I can use.- Backup the bookmarks, even if empty, to get an initial file.
- Unpack the archive.
- Insert bookmarks into the existing XML structure.
- Repack the archive.
- Restore from the modified zip file.
- Enjoy your new wealth of bookmarks.
bookmarks.xml by hand, here is some Scala code.:val bookmarkXml = scala.xml.XML.loadFile(targetFolder + "/bookmarks.xml")
val lastOrder = Integer.parseInt((bookmarkXml \\ "order").last.text)
val oldNodes = bookmarkXml \\ "bookmark"
val newNodes = to_xml_list(bookmarks, lastOrder + 1000)
val root = <bookmarks>{ oldNodes }{ newNodes }</bookmarks>
scala.xml.XML.save(targetFolder + "/bookmarks.xml", root, "UTF8", true, null)Thanks to Scala's excellent XML support, reading and modifying the bookmarks file is easy. The method to_xml_list() iterates all favourites and creates XML fragments for each one using the following method.def to_xml(bm: Favorite, order: Int) = {
<bookmark>
<title>{ bm.name }</title>
<url>{ bm.url }</url>
<order>{ order }</order>
<created>{ bm.fileDate.getTime }</created>
</bookmark>
}Favorite is a class representing an Internet Explorer favourite that I wrote long ago. (Yeah baby, code reuse!) Value order is the number Bookmark Explorer uses for sorting bookmarks. See the complete source of GuenmatBookmarks.scala.
3 comments:
This method works well on HTC Desire. But there is a minor glitch in Guenebaud's Bookmarks Manager when used on the Samsung Galaxy S: The import of bookmarks works, but they are not displayed in the bookmark list of the browser. Instead they are shown in the history of the browser and there they are marked as bookmark (little yellow star). To fix this you have to open each of these pages in the browser. Once it’s loaded, it’s shown in the list of bookmarks together with the proper icon as expected.
@Peter Kofler - Thank you very much regarding Samsung Galaxy issue. But could you please let me know, how can i resolve this issue programmatically ?
I'm not sure. It could be an Android browser problem. At least it looks like one because the pages are marked as bookmarked, but not displayed in the main list. AFAIK Galaxy and HTC use different browsers. The one by HTC is a special version or custom at all. Maybe it's missing an optional field, e.g.date of last access (if exists).
Post a Comment