URL Manager Pro

I first learned of URL Manager's existence from Guy Kawasaki's MacWay list-- he mentioned it as one of his favorite programs-- and I've come to find it exceptionally useful, too. Why might you need a program to manage URLs when most web browsers have a facility for keeping bookmarks? I can think of a few reasons: hierarchical menus quickly become unwieldy, they cannot easily be searched, and adding bookmarks to particular locations isn't easy. But URL Manager Pro does much more than that. There are many, many URL organizing programs available, but this is one of the best, most reasonably priced, and most stable. Alco Blom adds features at a breathtaking pace. Here are some of the unique features of the program:

1. Using Peter Lewis's Internet Config, URL Manager manages all of your internet apps by means of application dock (which can be hidden); double-clicking on a bookmark automatically launches the app associated with that URL, and bookmarks can also be dragged onto an application's icon.
2. You can drop any text file on URL Manager, and the program will extract all the URLs from it and make bookmarks. Bookmarks can be imported from and exported to your browser or can be exported as regular HTML.
3. URL Manager integrates with Netscape by adding its own menu to Netscape's; the contents of a URL Manager bookmark folder can be displayed in the Netscape menu as if they were Netscape bookmarks. Adding a bookmark to URL Manager from within Netscape is as easy as pressing command-K.
4. URL Manager fully implements Macintosh drag-and-drop: with a URL Manager window oriented vertically on the right side of my screen, it is easy to drag a bookmark into a Eudora message window .
5. URL Manager can automatically keep track of the last 100 sites that you've visited.
6. In its convenient "Explore" menu, URL Manager gives you convenient access to well-known web search services (Yahoo, Lycos, Altavista ...), but also to your home page (which you set in Internet Config), Info-Mac, and Apple's tech info library.
7. It is extremely easy to find a URL among many: hit command-F, type in the first few letters, and hit return for "OK." Command-G performs "Find again." Any list of URLs works in precisely the same manner as the Finder's "list by name" view.
8. URL Manager comes with control strip module giving you access to some of the sites listed on the Explore menu and to your home page.

URL Manager Pro requires 450K of RAM and approximately 300K of disk space (in addition to bookmark files). URL Manager Pro costs $25; there is also a version simply called URL Manager $15 ($10 for education customers) which omits the menu sharing features with Netscape.