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Dear Hookmark newsletter subscriber,
Time to act, because the WinterFEST sale is on until Jan 8. Save 25% on finely crafted link-friendly Mac software such as BBEdit, HoudahSpot, Panorama X, DEVONthink 3, Bookends, Nisus Writer Pro, and Trickster. Hookmark Pro, Hookmark Standard, Hookmark Updates and Upgrade to Pro licenses are also on sale.
In a recent macOS version, Apple introduced an annoyance to link-lovers. When you paste a well-formed link into Apple Mail, Mail strips out the name and just preserves the URL. That's likely not what you or your recipients want; because, after all, you didn't simply copy a URL. Recently we added an Advanced Action ☰ button menu command specifically to get around this annoyance: Copy Link for Apple Mail.
Why did we bother? The answer is that Hookmark aims to be a "Swiss Army" knife for all your hyperlinking needs.
In an era in which every "new" app seems to be a copycat, Hookmark stands out as being highly original. This does pose onboarding and marketing challenges, however. Hookmark is such an innovative app that people can't pigeonhole it using existing categories.
April Dunford is a Canadian positioning consultant, speaker, and author of Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning so Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It. Her first rule of positioning is that customers should be able rapidly to identify competitive alternatives to your product. Hookmark doesn't have direct competitors. However it's useful to understand Hookmark in relation to two types of app.
So here's how to think about Hookmark in terms of familiar categories. We see Hookmark as complementing rather than replacing apps in the familiar categories.
Hookmark is not a general-purpose launcher. However, it launches apps, documents and other objects. The main difference between Hookmark and a traditional launcher is that Hookmark is contextual whereas traditional launchers are essentially search tools. With traditional launchers, to get any results you need to manually type your search expression. In contrast, to access hooks you just need to invoke Hookmark on one side of the hook. Or you can click on the links, garnered from Hookmark, that you've stored in a document or object.
Hookmark can be thought of as "content-addressable memory".
That's why we say that Hookmark is the first and only contextual launcher for macOS. Hookmark does not replace traditional launchers, which are still useful for "random access" search.
Traditional bookmarking apps only allow you to bookmark web pages. Hookmark in contrast is a universal bookmarking app; it can bookmark any resource that has a URL.
Furthermore, traditional bookmarking apps store your bookmarking in a searchable database consisting of folders. Hookmark also has a globally searchable database of bookmarks. But with Hookmark you can access bookmarks in the context of any hooked resource. These contextual bookmarks are known as Hooks. In fact, Hookmark's context window can also show you related items and indirectly hooked items.
Moreover, whereas traditional bookmarking apps require that you manually bookmark resources (or alternatively, their history view will include every web page you've accessed), Hookmark, in contrast, automatically bookmarks any resource that you touch with Hookmark: whatever you copy, hook, or make a hookmark file for. Those actions indicate a high signal-to-noise ratio. If you've touched something with Hookmark, odds are you will want to get to it again (that's the point of touching something with Hookmark).
That's why we say Hookmark is the world's first and only truly universal, contextual, automatic bookmarking app.
What Hookmark does not do, which some bookmarking software does, is to cache web pages. That's why we've integrated Hookmark with several bookmarking services, and plan to add more.
We @ CogSci Apps appreciate the opportunity to serve your cognitive productivity needs. We wish you a very happy and healthy 2025!
Copyright © 2025 CogSci Apps Corp. All rights reserved.
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