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Pukka 1.5: Who says nothing good happens on Friday the 13th?

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We're happy to announce today the release of Pukka 1.5! This release has lots of goodies, so you can either cut to the chase and go download it or read on for more information.

Pukka 1.5 brings three classes of changes: improved performance, new features, and minor changes. I'll summarize some of them here. As always, you can get the full list within Pukka's self-updating functionality or straight from the RSS changelog.

First and foremost, we've done the near-impossible and made Pukka launch faster! Many parts of the UI are now loaded on demand so that the initial application is leaner and meaner. We think you'll like the improvement -- but after all, one bounce in the dock is still one bounce ;-)

Second in the performance department, Pukka is now much gentler on the bookmarking API. In recent weeks, del.icio.us seems to have implemented some checks that would cause background caching of bookmarks to result in errors. This was particularly true for users who posted many links quickly. We've optimized this process and now you should rarely see this issue at all.

On a related note, Pukka now features a pull-out console for the times when things are not going smoothly. Perhaps you've entered your password wrong or the API is just down. Now if you like, you can dig into the problem a bit and see if it's something you've done or if it's the service instead.

Speaking of services, Pukka now supports alternate API URLs. What this means is that if the del.icio.us API URL ever changes (info on that here) and we don't get to it first, you can keep on bookmarking. However, more importantly, Pukka can now work with services other than del.icio.us as long as they mirror the del.icio.us API. One popular service that does this is Ma.gnolia (more info here). More on Pukka and alternate API URLs a bit later.

In order to support some of these new features, Pukka's preferences have gotten a visual overhaul as well. The pictures say it all:

Old New

I won't go into everything else that's new, but a couple other minor features that made their way in include:

  • Pukka can now quit immediately after posting for the ultimate in low overhead.
  • You can configure Pukka to bounce the dock icon upon successful posting. Useful if you don't use the sound effects or Growl.
  • The tag suggestion delay can now be configured in the preferences between None, Short, Medium, and Long delay.
  • You can now enable or disable the menus of accounts, tags, and bookmarks that appear in the dock menu.
  • A new intro screencast is available from the Help menu.

Whew... ok, that's it -- now go get Pukka!

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HAZZAH!

Now, if only I could post to multiple accounts simultaneously... with maybe check-boxes to allow/disallow a post to a specific account. That way, when I have a link that I want in my personal Ma.gnolia account _and_ my business account but not to my friends and family account, I could do just that, with one submit!

Hey... a boy can dream.

Hey Silus :-)

Some time back I added a compromise feature to let you do just that. If you hold down the Option key when posting, the form will not reset and you can quickly make any edits necessary, change the account (Command [ and ] are the shortcuts), and re-post quickly.

I say compromise feature because I wanted to avoid providing a spammer tool for mass posting of links. This way, there's some effort involved, but it's still pretty easy.

yes! thanks for ma.gnolia support.

Very nice! Now, if I could embed spaces in tags and separate them with commas when posting to ma.gnolia ...

A great interim solution... thanks for the heads-up!

Hi,

how can I have 2 separate accounts, one for del.icio.us and one for ma.gnolia?
When I add a second account in the preferences I can't specify the API this account should use, so when I specify ma.gnolia's mirrored API it just posts to ma.gnolia but not to del.icio.us anymore.

Thanks in advance

@Patrick: Pukka doesn't yet have support for both protocols at once -- though I am considering it in the future. Can I ask -- why do you use both services? I'm trying to understand peoples' needs for more than one bookmarking service.

When I have sound effects turned on and automatically quit after posting, I don't get the reassuring 'successful post' sound. Which I'm sure I'll get used to, but I thought I'd mention it.

@Harry: Yeah, this is intentional. The problem is that the program interrupts the sound effect about a 1/2 second in while quitting, which sounds funny. I thought that no sound might be better than delaying the quit, but come to think of it, maybe not. What do you think, given that it was on purpose?

I don't think it's necessarily a problem; I'll get used to it quickly enough, I'm sure. But I have 'hide after submitting' on, and after I post, at the back of my mind I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop. As it were. Presumably, if it doesn't successfully post it'll beep or something to let me know, so that should be fine; I'm just finding it a bit disconcerting at the moment.

I can imagine a use-case, Justin: I work at X company, and they use del.ico.us for keeping a running log of news items about themselves, about their market — what have you — so their sales force has a ready-made library of materials to draw from on the road. At home, I use Ma.gnolia because I love their interface, and because all of my friends use it.

Just a thought... but Patrick's may be a different story.

I second Harry's request for comma-separated, space-supporting tags... I know that's different Delicious, but it would be cool if you had support for it.

In any case, as I said via email, I'm thrilled about your support for Ma.gnolia in this release and can't wait to see it get better!

Two things I think I'd like to see:

1. del.icio.us has that nifty tag suggestion bit at the bottom of their bookmarklet -- tag autocompletion is nice, but sometimes I like seeing the suggestions

2. some way to filter in the dock list with a threshold -- e.g. tags with 2,5,10 or more entries... maybe a menu with a bottom entry that toggled or opened up a fill window with all of them?

>> Pukka can now quit immediately after posting for the ultimate in low overhead.

Weird, my previous message did not complete come through, so here it is again:

Thanks for the great new release and for this feature (quit after post). I really wanted this because I hate seeing additional apps in my dock when not in use, and I use the bookmarklet to lunch pukka and post to delicious. This rocks!

Actually I just want to have a backup of my bookmarks on an other service, if either del.icio.us or ma.gnolia is down.

Thanks for your reply and I'm really looking forward to the future version.

Keep up the good work

@Patrick

Have you looked at Scuttle? It is a open source clone of the delicious API that you can self-host (or have someone host for you). It can sync with delicious (or seemingly magnolia). I use it to keep my own bookmarks and it works great with Pukka :)

I've heard of Scuttle before and I'll now check it out as well. Glad to hear it works with Pukka!

Since I had some trouble setting up support for Scuttle in Pukka:

The API-Url has to be:

http://YOUR-SERVER-GOES-IN-HERE/scuttle/api/posts_add.php

"One more thing":

I would like to see Pukka supporting the 'Private' feature of Delicious or even better 'Private' / 'Shared' feature of Scuttle.

@Phil: Pukka does support private bookmarking... you need to enable it in the Interface tab of Preferences and then a lock icon shows up in the main window. More info here.