Gimme Bar is a gorgeous app for browsing and sharing Web content

Gimme Bar is a gorgeous new “book-saving” application from NYC-based Fictive Kin that lets you save web content the way you browse magazines at a news stand. For those of you who don’t remember print magazines, that means holding onto them.

Grab pretty much anything you want, and Gimme Bar will help you organize it into a library that’s gorgeous to look at, and stores it for later use. Rather than a “bookmark,” or a link, you’re saving full content into your Dropbox account, which is also backed up on your computer. You can take screenshots of a full web page, and save those too. The Gimme Bar team describes their tool as, “basically an Internet Shamwow, and with their browser bar, it’s easy to save files without having to keep the app open all the time.

Gimme Bar is a shining triumph of design. What is a complex function to carry out under the hood becomes simple and intuitive to use. In fact, using Gimme Bar is a fun excuse to search for and collect content. I made a quick gallery of yarnbombing photos and articles to test it out.

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Wanting to look for more content on the topic in the public stream, I wasn’t able to, though. Instead, Gimme Bar focuses on serendipitous discovery, based on what other users are sharing in their public feeds. And because early users to the community are high profile bloggers like Jason Kottke, as well as in-the-know design types, this isn’t a bad thing. For the purposes of a stylish content flagging site, this is exactly who you would want to seed your community.

However, it would seem that the backend is still a little creaky, and the site is loading very slowly. It takes a long time to get confirmation that a task has been completed, such as adding new people I’d like to follow. As we all know, on the web slow = death. I did also have a problem when I accidentally made a photo private, and wanted to add it to my collection as part of the public fire hose. When I tried to reselect the same image and re-upload it, I couldn’t. I was told that I already have it, which I knew.

In any case, Gimme Bar is in the middle of a three-day beta period where anyone can sign up, so hopefully the bugs will be worked out soon.