Hallon

by Aaron Plane • 12/14/2006 at 01:51 PM

I’m willing to be bold and say that most of you have many, many bookmarks in your browser. Whether it’s a video of Diet Coke and Mentos, or a link to the (all-mighty) mothership of Apple.com, we all have them. And they sit nicely in a toolbar or bookmark area of Safari, Camino, Firefox, etc. The one limitation of this is that these bookmarks can only be applied to websites, and nothing more.
Enter Hallon. Written by the same developer as the open source Smultron text editor, this open source app takes bookmarking to a whole new level - system wide. Now, not only can you bookmark a page in your browser, but you can also bookmark a certain part of your computer. All of this can be yours in a small 0.7 MB package.

There are 7 applications that Hallon currently supports natively. These are: Address Book, Finder, iPhoto, iTunes, Mail, Safari, and the Terminal. You can also download additional modules from the website. These include: iPhoto 4, iPhoto 5, Firefox, Microsoft Entourage, Camino, BibDesk, Shiira, and NetNewsWire. The website even has instructions for developers about how to add their app!
My favourite overall feature of Hallon has to be the iTunes capability. I can select my favourite songs and refer back to them without performing a search in iTunes. The Finder capability is also refreshing: now, if I want to find a file, folder or app quickly, or if I have trouble remembering where a certain file is, I can easily refer to that little, friendly berry in my system tray.
Of course, you could also use Hallon to replace your browser’s bookmarks; if you want to open a bookmark right away, you can do so without even opening your browser first. Many browsers, however, already do a sufficient job of loading and serving your bookmarks.

One of the strong points of this app is the ability to use and set different keyboard shortcuts. Currently, I use Option-Space to add bookmarks on the fly (it fits nicely with Quicksilver being Ctrl-Space and Spotlight being Command-Space), although different key combinations can be selected at will in the Preferences.
A very interesting feature of Hallon is the ability to open a bookmark “silently”. In Finder, for example, this means just showing the file and not opening it. In iTunes, it means showing the song, but not playing it.

Now that you have all your bookmarks, the menus may begin to look messy. Using the Organizer, you can also set an expiry date on certain bookmarks (and even set an alarm to notify you). This is handy for bookmarks that you don’t need to keep forever, but might want for a month or a week, et cetera.
All in all, Hallon is an excellent way to quickly access your favorite collections, whether it be URLs, songs or files. Hallon is released under an open source license, and it is free (as in freedom) to use and to tinker with the source.