Copyright (c) 2010 Arjun Guha. All Rights Reserved.
Licensed by the terms of the GNU General Public License 3.0. See the file LICENSE for details.
Deliciousync is a utility that periodically synchronizes Safari's bookmarks with bookmarks from a Delicious account.
To uninstall, delete:
- the Deliciousync application bundle,
- the folder
~/Library/Application Support/Deliciousync, - the file
~/Library/LaunchAgents/DeliciousyncAgent.plist, and - the application password for Deliciousync (launch the Keychain Access utility).
The Deliciousync application bundle uses a command-line tool, DeliciousyncAgent that does the actual work of synchronization. The GUI is a front-end to configure the agent, which may be used independently.
When opened, Deliciousync copies the agent and configuration files to the following directory:
~/Library/Application Support/Deliciousync
Deliciousync also creates a launchd configuration file that periodically launches the agent:
~/Library/LaunchAgents/DeliciousyncAgent.plist
Hence, launchd can locate and launch the agent, even if the Deliciousync bundle is moved.
The agent uses Sync Services to synchronize with Safari, and the api.del.icio.us HTTP API to synchronize with Delicious. In the Application Support folder, the agent maintains a cache of Safari and Delicious bookmarks. This cache lets the agent sync incrementally.
For the moment, Deliciousync does not synchronize folders and tags. However, Deliciousync lets the user select a destination folder in Safari for newly created Delicious bookmarks.
Deliciousync associates Safari and Delicious bookmarks by URL. Since Delicious only permits a single bookmark per URL, a Delicious bookmark may correspond to multiple Safari bookmarks.
A complete synchronization round has four steps that are executed in order:
- pull updates from Delicious,
- push updates to Safari,
- pull updates from Safari, and
- push updates to Delicious.
In most cases, Safari and Delicious will be consistent after a single synchronization round; i.e. another synchronization will yield no further updates, assuming no further updates are made. For example:
- If a bookmark is deleted or renamed in Delicious, all its associated bookmarks are deleted or renamed in Safari.
- If a bookmark is deleted in Safari and there are no other Safari bookmarks with the same URL, then the bookmark is deleted from Delicious.
However, renaming a Safari bookmark is trickier. Suppose a single URL is bookmarked multiple times in Safari with different names. What should we name the associated Delicious bookmark? In this situation, we arbitrarily pick one of its names. On the next synchronization round, all associated Safari bookmarks are renamed to the name we picked earlier.