If you are unfamiliar with Alfred, it’s a much better Spotlight that allows you to write your own extensions. There are tons of workflows you can download.
I found a workflow that allowed me to search my current Chrome bookmarks, but it was slow. It was slow because it converted the json bookmark file to a sqlite database. When my bookmark file updated it would drop the database and create it again which took a few seconds. The problem is I use xmarks to sync my bookmarks across all my browsers and computers, this caused the file to update every few minutes.
I wanted performance, so I originally created the proof of concept in two languages, Ruby and PHP, and benchmarked them. If you are following my other posts you could probably guess I picked PHP to solve this problem. You can see from the results that it was much much faster. I tried caching the bookmarks many ways, with a manual way to clear the cache but realized reading directly from the JSON isn’t that slow and now just read it every time.
I’d like to announce the final result is working. You can now install my super fast Chrome Bookmark Workflow over at Github.
