f.lux, Night Shift, and sleeping better

March 28, 2016
by Riccardo Mori
Tech Life

Glenn Fleishman, in an article at Macworld titled iOS 9.3: The new Night Shift feature probably won’t help you sleep better:

In fact, this feature likely will have little or no effect on most people. Apple hasn’t misrepresented any of the science, but clinical work done to date doesn’t point a finger right at mobile devices or even larger displays. Night Shift also can’t remove enough blue to make a difference if that color is the culprit. And blue light may not be the trigger it’s been identified as. While researchers haven’t tested the new feature yet, several factors add up to at best a placebo effect and a reminder to power yourself down.

The article is well worth a read. I just want to report my experience on the matter, an experience that leads me to believe that tools like f.lux and the Night Shift feature in iOS 9.3 can, in fact, be effective. All I can offer is anecdotal data, but I don’t think the benefits I’ve noticed are simply the result of a placebo effect.

I’ll talk about f.lux, because none of my iOS devices supports Night Shift — both my iPad 3 and iPhone 5, despite running iOS 9.3, are 32-bit devices.

I first installed f.lux on my MacBook Pro in late 2009. It came as a trusted recommendation from a night owl friend who told me he had started noticing much less eye strain immediately after trying the software. I was sceptical at first, but figured it wouldn’t hurt to give it a try. 

Now, this is probably going to sound like a sponsored testimonial, but hear me out. 

Since I started freelancing around 2000, my daily schedule and habits have been severely disrupted. Before, when I had to go to university or to a workplace by 8:30 in the morning, I typically went to sleep at 11 PM to wake up at 6:30–7 AM, more or less. As soon as the reason to wake early in the morning went away, and the freelancing demanded I stayed an increasing number of hours at my computer every day, I quickly turned into a night owl. I went through a terrible period of overwork, staying up until 5 AM to get up at 9:30 and go on with my work assignments. Since I’ve always worked with text, that means staring at words on a white electronic page for hours, and well into the night. You can imagine the effect on my eyes, eyesight and sleep. There were periods where the fatigue reached such a point that I started wearing sunglasses when working at my Mac at night. 

As for sleep, the problem wasn’t insomnia — I never had issues at falling asleep, thank goodness. In fact, I often go to bed so tired that it takes me like two minutes to fall asleep once I’ve acquired my ‘sleeping position’. The problem, before switching to f.lux, was the quality of my sleep. Sometimes my sleep got fragmented by waking up three or four times during the night (well, morning); sometimes, despite going to bed extremely tired, I would wake up after three hours and couldn’t get back to sleep no matter how hard I tried; sometimes, despite sleeping seven-eight hours, I would get up the following morning feeling more tired and unfocussed than the day before. 

You’re free to believe what you want, but after one week of using f.lux on my Mac, the eye strain was completely gone. My eyes stopped ending up bleary and teary at night, but most importantly my sleep got better too, generally speaking. I still experience the occasional bad night, but that usually happens when I sleep less than six hours. All those sleep disruptions mentioned in the previous paragraph have rapidly vanished since I started using f.lux.

Now, you might wonder: Are you sure it’s thanks to f.lux that you’re feeling better at night?

I’m quite sure, because a few months ago I did a little experiment: I disabled f.lux for two weeks. The eye strain returned almost instantly, and the quality of sleep started deteriorating from the second night on. Going back to f.lux was a relief. I know, perhaps it’s all auto-suggestion. Perhaps a more scientific way to conduct my test was to stop using f.lux for a longer period and see whether my sleep re-adjusted in the long run after the initial ‘shock’. But that second week without f.lux was hard: I had forgotten how bad reading and writing at 4 AM was. I experienced a similar drop in quality of sleep and increase in eye strain when I tried using my iPad as primary machine, and that happened before I could sideload f.lux on my iPhone and iPad. Sure, the fatigue and general disruption weren’t that severe — a 9.7‑inch display without f.lux isn’t as dazzling as a 24-inch widescreen monitor at 4 in the morning, but still, the negative effects were perceptible.

I am well aware that this is just my experience, and not scientific research. It could all just be a placebo effect for all I know, although it’s strange how my eyes get sore and teary every time I don’t use f.lux — e.g. when I happen to do some photo editing late at night, and I keep f.lux off for obvious reasons — while they remain well-rested when f.lux is enabled and I’m writing at 5 AM. And I don’t think that quality of sleep is something I can subconsciously control, so there must be some external factor to take into account for my much improved sleep these past years. Maybe the use of f.lux has just been coincidental, but what matters to me is the outcome — a better sleep.

Looped in

March 23, 2016
by Riccardo Mori
Tech Life

Let’s start from the end. To those tech writers ‘bored’ and ‘disappointed’ by the event: what is wrong with you? What did you expect from a one-hour minor event? (‘Minor’ due to the venue Apple chose, its own Town Hall). I’m with Gruber on this: That the event was held in Town Hall and not a larger venue was a signal that Apple wasn’t going to unveil anything spectacular. It’s not reasonable to expect the spectacular from every single event.

Were you bored? Take your grudge to the rumour industry. In recent years, major rumour sites have reached an impressive level of accuracy, and it’s practically impossible to get to the date of a scheduled Apple event being completely spoiler-free. This saddens me. I understand that speculation and rumours are important to keep the tech news landscape interesting, but I sorely miss the days when you had little to no idea about what Apple would introduce; or, if you had, you didn’t know anything about the definitive shape of a product. (I fondly remember Jobs introducing the iPhone and the MacBook Air, for example).

But sometimes I’m happy when the rumour industry gets certain details wrong. According to recent rumours, for instance, the iPhone SE was supposed to share the same curved edges of the iPhones 6(s) and 6(s) Plus, and the same hardware buttons’ placement. I was relieved to see that Apple chose a more conservative approach, retaining both the design and button placement of the iPhone 5s.

A friend messaged me after the event, asking So, what did Apple mean with that “Let’s loop you in” tag line? Not that I typically give much thought to these event tag lines, but I chose to read it this way: what’s been announced and introduced on 21 March is meant to entice people who have been sort of kept out of a loop — i.e., people who still prefer a smaller iPhone than the 6 line, and people who loved the idea of an iPad Pro with that gorgeous Apple Pencil, but didn’t want a device that big. Not to mention people who may have been interested in an Apple Watch, but still felt $349 to be a steep entry price (during the event, Cook announced that now the most affordable Apple Watch — the 38mm Sport edition — will start at $299).

The iPhone SE

And yes, I was one of those people; and yes, what Apple did with the iPhone SE certainly makes me feel ‘looped in’. It’s as if a feature wishlist for my next iPhone materialised before my eyes. After handling the 6(s) and 6(s) Plus, while appreciating certain features (speed, display, camera performance, 3D Touch), I found myself disliking both the size and design — those ugly lines at the top and bottom of the phone’s back, the camera bump, and the ‘flattened soap bar’ shape that almost made me drop an iPhone 6s at the local Apple Store. I really wanted the power of an iPhone 6s in the body of a 5s, and that’s exactly what the iPhone SE delivers.

One of the things I tweeted after the event is that the iPhone SE feels like the iPod Classic. What I mean is that, just like the iPod Classic, the iPhone SE appears ready to attain a similarly iconic status. The iPod Classic is the iPod concept at its most quintessential. And so, I think, will be the iPhone SE. It’s the most well-balanced iPhone, design-wise, and I strongly disagree with those who find its design ‘old’: visually, it has a timelessness that the bigger 6(s) and 6(s) Plus definitely lack. From a usability standpoint it handles unquestionably better. It feels great in the hand, the grip is firmer than its bigger siblings’, it can be used without a case and it doesn’t feel like it’s ready to slip away from your hands when you use it one-handed or when you’re taking photos. 

In short — yes, my next phone will be the iPhone SE. In his article, Biggie Smalls, Nick Heer observes:

I’ve always been a fan of the 5S’ form factor, too — to my eyes and hands, it’s the prettiest and most comfortable iPhone ever. But the drawbacks of an SE are not insignificant, compared to a 6S: its display panel isn’t as good, the cover glass isn’t as durable, the Touch ID sensor is the much slower first-generation version, it doesn’t have 3D Touch, and it isn’t available in a 128 GB storage configuration. These are all deal-breakers for me, though they may not be for you.

All those are certainly not deal-breakers for me, nor for those people who come from an older iPhone model. I currently have a 32 GB iPhone 5, so the SE’s display panel is likely to be better; the cover glass is probably the same, which is fine by me; it might have a first-generation Touch ID sensor, but given that my iPhone doesn’t have one, it’s still a great improvement; the lack of 3D Touch is a non-issue for the way I use my iPhone; and as for storage, while I strongly believe Apple should get rid of the 16 GB capacity once and for all, I must say that 32 GB can be enough (I currently have about 12 GB free in my iPhone 5), and a 64 GB iPhone SE will be more than enough for a lot of people. In my opinion, Apple has chosen all the right trade-offs in engineering the iPhone SE.

The 9.7‑inch iPad Pro

What about the new smaller iPad Pro? When rumours started circulating that what was first believed to be the new iPad Air 3 would actually be a second, smaller model in the iPad Pro line, I didn’t understand the move. What would make it a ‘Pro’ iPad? Just the Apple Pencil support? And when it’s time to upgrade the iPad Air 2, how is Apple going to differentiate the two 9.7‑inch iPads? Things got clearer for me at the end of the iPad Pro introduction, when this slide came up:

The new iPad line

It makes more sense when you put this lineup in context with other Apple product lines. Compare this with the current MacBook line: the iPad mini and iPad Air 2 are like the 11-inch and 13-inch MacBook Air, while the 9.7‑inch and 12.9‑inch iPad Pro are like the 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Pro. Maybe the feature gap isn’t exactly the same for now, but the new grouping in the iPad family makes more sense to me now. Two consumer iPads on the left, two prosumer iPads on the right.

As for the differences between the Air 2 and the 9.7‑inch iPad Pro, there’s definitely more than meets the eye. Just look at this other slide, recapping what the new iPad offers:

iPad Pro features

The smaller iPad Pro is an absurdly compelling device. It has basically everything the 12.9‑inch model has (except the size), and more, though I think the bigger iPad will get the better True Tone display and the better cameras at the next iteration. It will definitely meet the needs of all those who want a powerful iPad with unmatched drawing abilities but feel the 12.9‑inch model to be a little too much to handle. I have a third-generation 32 GB iPad, and seeing how a 32 GB 9.7‑inch iPad Pro today costs as much as my iPad cost me in 2012 while packing an incredible amount of technical innovation under the bonnet, upgrading to this new iPad should be a no-brainer, and it will be for a lot of people. I guess the iPad Air 2 will remain a viable option if, and only if, you’re really on a budget. As for me, I still aim to save enough money to get the 12.9‑inch model — contrary to my iPhone size preferences, when it comes to… non-pocketable devices, I prefer bigger screens.

The only design detail that perplexed me is probably the same that perplexed you — the protruding rear camera. Craig Grannell writes:

In terms of specifications, it seems to match the camera in the iPhone 6s, but that also means — just like on the iPhone — it is not flush with the case. When used flat on a table, this means the new iPad will wobble — not great if you’re drawing with Apple Pencil or even playing games. And how strong is that lip around the camera? What potential is there for damage? Will users essentially be forced into buying a case, thereby adding heft to the iPad and making its ‘thinness’ largely irrelevant?

I share his same concerns, though Matthew Panzarino has posted a brief video showing that the iPad does not wobble during use. Something that left me just as perplexed. It should wobble, but perhaps it’s a matter of size: the camera protrusion can be much less noticeable when counteracted by the wider surface and distributed weight of a 9.7‑inch iPad, as opposed to the smaller surface of an iPhone. I’m just guessing here; I’d really like to try the new iPad in person.

There are sadder things

During his iPad presentation, Phil Schiller (senior VP of marketing), fired this torpedo (emphasis mine):

There’s a second group of people that we’d love to reach with this iPad Pro: Windows users. You may not know this, but the majority of people who come to an iPad Pro are coming from a Windows PC.

Windows PCs were originally conceived of before there was an Internet, before there was social media, before there was app stores, and this is an amazing statistic: There are over 600 million PCs in use today that are over five years old. This is really… sad. It really is. These people could really benefit from an iPad Pro.

When they see the features and performance and capabilities of a product like the iPad Pro, designed for the modern digital lifestyle, many of them will find it is the ultimate PC replacement.

While he has a point, judging from many people’s reactions on Twitter and elsewhere, the part of his quote I’ve emphasised above did strike a discordant note. Some said that this is a bit rich coming from a company still selling a 13-inch MacBook Pro containing 4‑year-old technology, and whose current Pro laptops could really benefit from an update. I think that Schiller’s comment wasn’t meant to come across as harsh as it sounded. I took it to simply mean that many PC users with old computers are really missing out and should consider an iPad Pro to jump on the Post-PC era bandwagon. But yes, the delivery probably turned out to be more unfortunate than intended.

I’ll just close with a quip — There are sadder things than five-year-old PCs: the current state of the Mac App Store, to name one.

→ Surveillance capitalism

March 5, 2016
by Riccardo Mori
Briefly

Shoshana Zuboff, in The Secrets of Surveillance Capitalism:

I’ve come to a different conclusion: The assault we face is driven in large measure by the exceptional appetites of a wholly new genus of capitalism, a systemic coherent new logic of accumulation that I call surveillance capitalism. Capitalism has been hijacked by a lucrative surveillance project that subverts the “normal” evolutionary mechanisms associated with its historical success and corrupts the unity of supply and demand that has for centuries, however imperfectly, tethered capitalism to the genuine needs of its populations and societies, thus enabling the fruitful expansion of market democracy.

Surveillance capitalism is a novel economic mutation bred from the clandestine coupling of the vast powers of the digital with the radical indifference and intrinsic narcissism of the financial capitalism and its neoliberal vision that have dominated commerce for at least three decades, especially in the Anglo economies. It is an unprecedented market form that roots and flourishes in lawless space. It was first discovered and consolidated at Google, then adopted by Facebook, and quickly diffused across the Internet. Cyberspace was its birthplace because, as Google/Alphabet Chairperson Eric Schmidt and his coauthor, Jared Cohen, celebrate on the very first page of their book about the digital age, “the online world is not truly bound by terrestrial laws…it’s the world’s largest ungoverned space.”

While surveillance capitalism taps the invasive powers of the Internet as the source of capital formation and wealth creation, it is now, as I have suggested, poised to transform commercial practice across the real world too. An analogy is the rapid spread of mass production and administration throughout the industrialized world in the early twentieth century, but with one major caveat. Mass production was interdependent with its populations who were its consumers and employees. In contrast, surveillance capitalism preys on dependent populations who are neither its consumers nor its employees and are largely ignorant of its procedures.

Make time, and read the whole article carefully. It’s full of brilliant insights.

(Via Aral Balkan)

Siri on the Mac — a few thoughts

February 26, 2016
by Riccardo Mori
Tech Life

According to 9to5Mac, Siri will come with the next version of Mac OS X. Many have reacted to this bit of news with relief (“At long last”, “Finally”, etc.), while my reaction was much more lukewarm. I personally don’t have much use for Siri (I’ve previously talked about my frustrations with it), but I don’t doubt its usefulness for many other people.

Siri is the typical feature you either embrace fully or don’t much care about. It either fits in your workflow and device interaction, or it doesn’t. But while I understand how Siri could be helpful as an assistant and as a ‘shortcut’ when you’re handling an iPhone or iPad, on the Mac this potential helpfulness is harder for me to fathom, at least outside the Accessibility sphere.

When I expressed my scepticism on social media — “Many are saying Finally! to Siri coming with the next version of OS X. I really wonder what they’ve been dying to do with it.” — the few responses I got were essentially about being able to perform Spotlight searches, to use Siri as an app launcher, to set reminders, and a way to trigger music playback without having to deal with iTunes.

Here’s how I approach such tasks:

  • Spotlight search — I’m faster with the keyboard for most of my searches.
  • App launching — I use the Dock as Steve wanted. I just keep there all the apps I use most frequently. And for launching the occasional app that’s not in the Dock, I invoke Spotlight and type the first few letters of the app’s name.
  • Setting Reminders — I don’t use reminders at all. But if I did, I’d find more natural to use Siri on my iPhone, which is always close, than on my Mac.
  • Music playback — I don’t mind interacting with iTunes, but I also use Vox and Spotify. However, personal preferences apart, how would one interact with an interface-less music player? By always triggering Siri? Pause, Stop, Next song, Now play the David Bowie collection, Shuffle this album… A bit awkward and tiring, no? And if there were a minimal interface on screen, where would it be? In the menubar? Hovering over other windows? I’m really curious to see how this will be implemented.

Of all devices, the Mac is the most stationary, which allows for the most comfortable and fastest operation on the user’s part. While I ‘get’ using Siri to perform hands-free tasks in mobile situations when you have your iPhone, iPad or Apple Watch with you to talk to, I can’t imagine something like this happening while you’re in front of your Mac. But maybe I just lack imagination at the moment. Again, I’m focussing on users with no disabilities — of course Siri on the Mac would be awesome for people with motor impairments, sight issues, etc.

For example (since a few people brought this up), let’s take dictating stuff to Siri. If you’re out and about and need to send a message, a brief email reply, or set a reminder for yourself, it’s quite convenient to invoke Siri on your iPhone or Apple Watch, and ask Siri to help you with such tasks. You may have your hands occupied, or be engaged in another activity, or find yourself in a situation where taking out the iPhone to type the message yourself would be awkward or uncomfortable.

With a Mac, such scenarios are unlikely to happen, I think. And even considering a rather extreme case — someone using an Android phone and carrying around a MacBook — the laptop would likely be closed, sleeping, so in order to talk to Siri one would have to open the MacBook. At that point, it’d be just easier to carry out the task yourself. Siri might be ‘always on’ on the Mac, and at home the Hey Siri feature[1] might even be able to wake a desktop Mac from sleep, but how about a Mac laptop with a closed lid?

But whatever the use cases and the level of potential comfort Siri could bring to the Mac, the thing that concerns me when talking about Siri is always the same: reliability. Because I believe it would be immensely cool to perform complex Spotlight searches, maybe even while you’re working on something else, such as:

– Siri, search for all the documents mentioning ‘handwriting recognition’ modified in the last week, and open them in TextWrangler.

Or you’re preparing invoices and:

– Siri, open Mail and search for all messages from John Doe sent between Monday and Tuesday mentioning the translation assignment.

If Siri interpreted such commands 100% correctly, I would be using it all the time. That would really mean having a digital assistant à la Knowledge Navigator [video]. Now imagine the same two aforementioned examples, and Siri reacting with a response that has become all too familiar for me when I interact with it on my iPhone:

— Rick, I’m not sure I understand what you mean.

Or:

– Here’s what I found on John Doe on the Web [opens a panel with a Wikipedia page]

That would instantly transform a potentially time-saving feature in a terribly time-wasting one. To be useful on a Mac, more than on any other device, Siri has really to be quicker, accurate and more convenient than the user doing the same thing with the keyboard or mouse or trackpad.

Of course, these are just a few initial thoughts on the matter. I’ve read that Apple has been testing Siri on the Mac internally since 2012, so I bet that if Apple judges this feature to be mature, it will be implemented with a few smart tricks and won’t be just a half-finished gimmick. For now, though, I’ll just conclude by boringly remarking that Apple should prioritise the reliability of their existing software and services instead of adding another potential source of frustration for the user.

 

  • 1. Speaking of Hey Siri, I wonder what happens when you have it enabled on your iPhone, iPad and Mac, you’re sitting at your Mac with the other devices close by, and you invoke it. Would you need to start fiddling with Siri settings and remember to turn it off on the iPhone when you’re at your Mac, then turn it back on on the iPhone when you head out, and so on and so forth? ↩︎

 

Bookmark management: An idea for a centralised solution

February 11, 2016
by Riccardo Mori
Software

Scattered bookmarks

There’s a problem I’ve been trying to keep under control over time, with mixed results, that usually gets much worse when I’m busy: webpages and links I save for future reading or future reference don’t end up in the same place, but get scattered here and there. Perhaps you’re more organised than I am, but lately my ‘bookmark situation’ has become a sorry mess. At the moment, here’s a list of the places where I keep saved bookmarks:

  • Safari’s Reading List
  • Safari’s Bookmark Bar and Menu
  • Firefox’s Bookmark Toolbar and Menu
  • Starred articles inside Reeder
  • Google Chrome Bookmarks
  • Pinboard
  • Instapaper
  • I have a couple of notes inside Notational Velocity, where I keep a few links for quick access and reference.
  • I still probably have old bookmarks saved inside other browsers I now use only occasionally, like Camino, Stainless, Sleipnir.

Maybe I should try harder and focus on using just one of those places to store bookmarks, and that’s actually what I do when I browse and read leisurely. When I’m busy it’s a whole different matter: tabs open in Safari, tabs open in Firefox, Notational Velocity always open, feeds always at hand in Reeder. It’s easy to quickly add something interesting to Firefox’s Bookmarks instead of passing the link to Safari’s Reading List; or to parse headlines in Reeder and instinctively send to Instapaper (or star) a useful article I may want to read at a later moment or to keep for future reference. Not to mention all the previous stuff accumulated over time and saved in different places.

A centralised place

Sometimes I think: it would be great to simply right-click on a link, or invoke a system-wide service, to send such link to just one single centralised place. I know there’s already an Add to Reading List service, so I could probably stick to this shortcut as often as possible. If you don’t save many bookmarks, it’s probably your best option for keeping everything in one place and synchronised across devices/platforms thanks to iCloud. But when you have thousands of bookmarks, I’m not sure that Safari’s Reading List is the best solution. While having thousands of webpages saved for offline reading may be a handy thing, the interface for browsing them and organising them is lacking. (Not to mention the huge local cache that would result.) Reading List is a feature that’s meant to be used à la Instapaper more than like a regular bookmark manager, such as the one built in Safari and other browsers, or like an online service such as Pinboard.

What I’d love to see implemented in OS X is a sort of central bookmark database, living outside of Safari, accessible as a system-wide service, and manageable through a standalone application (let’s call it Bookmarks, in typical Apple naming style). 

  • Every time you want to save a link, you could do so by sending it to the Bookmarks app via a contextual menu command, via the Services framework, or via a keyboard shortcut.
  • When you want to access a saved bookmark, you could just open the Bookmarks app and search inside it, click on the link, and have it automatically opened in Safari (or your preferred browser). Or, if you remember an article’s title or part of it, you could search it in Spotlight and open it in Safari.
  • The Bookmarks app, being a standalone bookmark manager, could be used to keep all bookmarks organised in folders and with tags. Ideally, most of the tags would be machine-generated, retrieved from the websites themselves (a lot of articles you read online today already have tags at the end), but of course you could add all the personal tags you want.
  • When adding a link, a small panel could pop up, ‘library card’-style, showing Title, URL, and a Tag field, giving you the option of adding tags, shorten the title, etc., much like Pinboard’s interface. Through the app’s preferences you could specify a keyboard shortcut for adding links quickly and another for having the aforementioned pop-up panel appear every time you want to save a link.

Across devices

And now imagine a first-party Bookmarks app on iOS that syncs with the OS X counterpart via iCloud. You could quickly save a link in the Bookmarks app via 3D Touch — simply force-press on the link and Send to Bookmarks could appear as a pop-up menu. On iOS, the panel for adding tags and customising the bookmark could look like the card-style interface that appears when you use iOS’s service to share something to Twitter:

Sharing a link

Interaction with other iOS apps would be similar to what currently happens with Safari’s Reading List. You could send any link to the Bookmarks app using share sheets, and there could be an intelligent clipboard feature in the Bookmarks app that detects links copied in the clipboard and offers to add them to the database when you open the app directly (a behaviour I’ve noticed in Pinboard iOS clients and other similar apps).

But what’s the point? There’s already Safari’s Reading List

I know, and perhaps that’s enough for a lot of people. My idea is to have something a bit more flexible and customisable, that lives outside of Safari and merges the functionality of Safari’s Reading List and Safari’s bookmark manager, and that can work as a single, centralised place for managing all the links you want to save and keep for future reference — but in a way that’s more visible, less subtle than the current Add to Reading List service. And having a standalone bookmark manager, separated from Safari, doesn’t mean losing integration if you want to keep using Safari’s Bookmarks Bar. Bookmarks you place there would be mirrored behind the scenes and kept in sync with the ‘Bookmarks Bar’ folder inside this hypothetical Bookmarks app. 

If you want to save entire articles to be read offline, you could tell the Bookmarks app or service either when you add the link (e.g. by ticking a Save for offline access checkbox) or later, from inside the app, when you’re managing your saved links. Or, if you prefer third-party solutions, you could always send a link to Instapaper, Pinboard, or whatever ‘read later’ service you like — but you’d be always sure to have a copy saved in the system’s central bookmarks database. You wouldn’t end up with bookmarks scattered across different apps and services, not knowing where exactly you saved that article or resource. (Needless to say, during the initial setup process, the Bookmarks app could import all links saved elsewhere, warning you in case of duplicates, merging tags as necessary, you know the drill).

Now, I’m not a software developer. This of course is just an idea off the top of my head. It certainly needs refinement, and maybe it wouldn’t fit in your workflow, but I believe it would really be a nice solution if you’re in a similar rut as mine with regard to bookmark fragmentation.