I’ve been working on a little side-project for the last few weeks, and now I’m ready to reveal it in a soft opening kind of way. Say hi to my bookmarking app, Markcase.

I’ve been an ardent user of bookmarking apps right from the early days of Delicious. Since then I’ve been back and forward to Pinboard a few times and tried Pocket a couple of times. They’re all excellent apps for bookmarking, and they all have their pros and cons.

Delicious is now under the control of Pinboard, and Pinboard itself has been very quiet on the development front. It does what it promises, but after I struggled for a few weeks with bundle issues, I decided to close my account.

I like Pocket for its visual appearance, and it negates the need for a read-it-later service as well, but the last time I tried it, I found it challenging to organise all 1800 of my bookmarks.

I decided to roll my own bookmarking app. After a few weeks, I had a single-user version of Markcase up and running. A few weeks on and now I have Markcase running as a multi-user service. It’s still very early days for it, but I’m definitely keen to take it forward. There’s still lots of work to do, but it’s ready to go as a service for saving bookmarks and organising them.

It’s still in a state of beta though, but I would be interested in hearing from anyone who wants to give it a try. While in this beta phase, accounts will be given out as free, but once we leave the beta stage, accounts will be charged an annual fee for using Markcase. If you don’t feel like using Markcase beyond this point, then you can delete your account.

At the moment, you can log in, change some of your account details, save bookmarks with tags, organise them with tag bundles and use a private RSS feed for your bookmarks. I expect to add many features over the coming months including importing and exporting of bookmarks and integration with other apps and services.

As for native applications, Markcase is a web app first. It will work on mobile devices, without having to install an app. I will be providing an API in the future for those who want to build their own native app for Markcase, but it’s not something that I will be interested in doing for at least a year, maybe longer.

If you’re interested in taking Markcase for a spin, then please reply to this post on Micro.blog or email me at matthew [at] matthewlang [dot] net. I’ll be setting up account requests as and when they come in. It might not be right away as this step is manual at the moment. I will be adding a sign-up page after the beta has finished.

Markcase was previously called Commonmarks, but that was far too similar to Markdown specification of a same name. A name change was definitely needed.