Booker, a creative reference library

It is 2026 and a new browser ships every quarter. Chrome, Arc, Dia, whatever comes next: each one arrives with its own bookmark silo, and nobody cares what happens to the saves left behind. Saving got easier every year. Finding never did.

So bookmarks became lost treasure. We hold hundreds of them, collected over years across Chrome, Arc, Firefox, and Safari, and we never find the one we need. The tools that tried to fix this are either web silos that hold your data hostage (Pocket’s shutdown proved the risk) or utilitarian list managers with no visual sense.

Booker is a full bookmark replacement: every browser imports read-only into a local SQLite library, presented as an image-first board, made findable with on-device AI. Bookmark a page in Chrome and it lands in Booker seconds later, keyed by the browser’s stable IDs so re-imports never duplicate.

And it is local-first on principle. No account, no telemetry, no cloud. The library lives on your Mac, and export is always free.

I am a product designer, not a career systems engineer. Booker exists because AI finally collapsed the distance between a design decision and a shipped build: I design every screen, state, and interaction, then pair with Claude and Codex to turn that intent into production Swift.

The taste calls stayed human. What deserves glass and what does not, how dense the board should feel, what an empty state says, when the app should stay quiet: that judgment never left the design seat. AI wrote a lot of the code; the product opinions are mine.