Support
Write to [email protected]. Support is read by the people who build the app.
Bookplate
The trial, and the unlock
Bookplate is free to download and free to use for fourteen days. The trial starts in the app — the empty library's button is Start Free Trial…, and Settings ▸ Purchase opens the same sheet. The fourteen days run from the day it starts.
After that, saving and importing new items need the one-time unlock. Nothing already saved is affected: reading, search, tags, notes and export keep working, and Export…works whether or not anything has been bought.
Bought Bookplate on another Mac, or reinstalled it? Restore Purchases, in Settings ▸ Purchase, brings it back: the purchase belongs to your Apple ID rather than to one Mac.
Where the library is kept
On the Mac you are reading it on, inside Bookplate's own container. Nothing is synced and nothing is sent to us — there is no account and no server of ours. Export… writes the whole library into a folder you choose: each article as HTML and as Markdown, the images, a JSON manifest and a bookmarks file.
That export is also how a library moves. Import… reads Bookplate's own export back, and reads the files other read-later services let you take out.
A page that did not save
An item says where its copy stands. Saved means the article was read from the live page. Saved from archive means the live page could not be read and the copy came from the Internet Archive's capture of it instead — what to expect for a page that has since changed or disappeared. Link only means no article could be read from either: the link, your tags and your note are kept, and Open Original still opens it in your browser.
Some sites refuse to be fetched by anything but a browser, and some pages are not articles in the first place. Either way the link is kept, and Retry Capture asks again — worth trying after a network problem, or after a page comes back.
Hindcast
The menu-bar icon is not there
Hindcast can see that its item is not being drawn; it cannot see why. Two things hide a menu-bar item, and both look the same from inside the app.
The menu bar is full. It holds a fixed amount, and macOS fills it from the right-hand end: when there is no room left for another item, the item is simply not drawn — it is not hidden behind anything, and there is no overflow menu to find it in.
Your Mac has a notch. On a notched Mac the menu bar is split around the notch, and an item whose slot falls in that middle span is not drawn either. The bar runs out of room sooner than its length suggests, and the one place you cannot see into is where a newly added item goes.
Either way the icon comes back by itself once there is room for it, and nothing in Hindcast has to be restarted or re-enabled. Quitting a couple of menu-bar apps you do not need frees the room. A menu-bar manager — an app whose whole job is deciding which items are drawn, with the rest available on demand — is the deliberate version of the same thing.
Nothing is lost while the icon is not drawn. Recording carries on, and the main window'sCapture menu carries the same status, the same Pause and Resume, and Open Review — so this is a missing control, not a missing feature.
If you have a second display, look at that display's menu bar: macOS draws the item there too, and it is often still there. Every Mac app with a menu bar item has this limit, and none of them can lift it — an app cannot move its own item to another display.
What to include in a report
- what you did, and what you expected to happen;
- what happened instead;
- your macOS version, and the app version from its About window;
- a screenshot, if the problem is something you can see.
Please do not send an export of your records. Nothing in it is needed to answer a support question, and it is better off staying on your Mac.
Worth reading first
Bookplate
- Privacy — what is kept on your Mac, and the requests that leave it.