You may have noticed that we have mentioned Agenda, the Apple Design Award-winning date-focused note-taking app, several times this year. They have improved their software several times, making it very link-friendly.(view this email in your browser)
Dear Hook Productivity newsletter subscriber,
We're entering another phase of major announcements. Today this pertains to the rebranding of "Hook", the release of version 4 under the new brand, and Marked 2 supporting adaptive hook://file/ image links. But let's start with gratitude for Alexander Griekspoor and Drew McCormack and their Agenda software.
You may have noticed that we have mentioned Agenda, the Apple Design Award-winning date-focused note-taking app, several times this year. They have improved their software several times, making it very link-friendly.
Agenda and its founders, Alexander Griekspoor and Drew McCormack, had a significant influence on the development of our software. We blogged about this history today.
It's a bit late in the month, but we are super delighted to announce that Agenda is our Partner of the Month of October. The late timing is to coincide with the fact that:
Firstly, Hook has evolved quite a bit since it was first introduced. In particular, in version 2.0, it became the world's first universal, automatic contextual bookmarking app, even integrating in original ways with several bookmarking apps & services. We've been expanding the bookmarking functionality, and have major updates planned on this front for 2023.
The essence of our software remains, however, the retrieval of contextual information. Invoke the contextual window, and you'll see any "hooks" you've associated with the foreground item (or the item you've navigated in). Bidirectional linking predates Hook of course. Bidirectional linking had never really taken off before Hook. Another academic expert and I were discussing this around the Human'22 Hypertext workshop which was held in Barcelona and to which Ben Shneiderman and I gave keynotes. (You can read the Interview of me by hypertext expert, Claus Atzenbeck, for ACM SIGWEB here. My paper is here). We agreed that part of the problem was terminology: there lacked an adequate word stem for two-way linking that could do the job: as verb, noun and adjective.
The verb "to hook", the noun "hook", and the adjective "hooked", which CogSci Apps applied in hypertext space, solves this communication problem. It's "short and sweet", as someone put it yesterday on Twitter. But "Hook" was our brand name. This made it difficult to discuss the concept as separate from the brand.
So, secondly, by changing the name of our software to Hookmark, we are freeing ourselves, our customers, and others to use the word "hook" to refer to bidirectional links or linking, without ambiguity as to whether it refers to our app's name. It no longer does. With your help, this usage may have a major impact on hypertext software well beyond semantics. Words matter!
It will be readily apparent to new customers, as it is to you, that Hookmark is a portmanteau of "hook" (noun & verb) and "bookmark", which are two dictionary words.
Other reasons for the change are described in our rebranding FAQ.
Apart from branding and revolutionizing software by finally making it easy to talk about bidirectional linking, the name change matters little. If your questions are not answered in our rebranding FAQ, please let us know and we will answer you and update the FAQ. We are Canadian 🇨🇦 after all, so we aim to please — sorry and thank you 😊 [inside cultural joke].
We've released Hookmark 4. It is mainly a rebranding release.
Also, we have:
Please note that despite the rebranding, Hookmark will continue to use hook:// custom URL schemes (rather than hookmark://, such as hook://email/ and hook://file/). All your old links will work.
You can read more in the Hookmark 4 release notes.
We've already hinted at this in a prior email but thought we should let you know to look out for something very special in Brett Terpstra's next update to the Marked app. Whereas with legacy apps, you can only include images with file:// and http(s):// URL schemes, Marked will allow you to use hook://file/ URLs in
So instead of using a legacy style relative or absolute path, such as:
Marked will enable you to write links like this:
This means that from now until infinity, you can move and rename your images without fearing that image links to them will break! It also means that you can easily reference the same image in innumerable Markdown files without having to duplicate them in a folder in each document that uses them. As long as Hookmark can find the files, Marked will load them and display them to you!
This feature can be used in combination with Hookmark shortcuts to rapidly generate screenshots and generate a Markdown image link to them!
That's one of the big advantages of Hookmark: you don't need to worry about where you store files. Just reference them with Hookmark's adaptive links.
We didn't want to confuse readers with rebranding plus putting a dozen new features in Hookmark 4 — those features will come in Hookmark 5, which is well under way. Instead, we'd like to draw your attention to features of Hookmark that you might not have used already.
Reveal File in Finder (⌘R) to locate the file, regardless of where it is stored.Hook to New.
We can't keep track of all the mentions of Hookmark on the web. However, we noticed that Matthew Cassinelli mentioned earlier this month our Shortcuts in What's New in Shortcuts Issue #46. Share your favorite mentions of Hookmark on Twitter, using our new Twitter handle: @Hookmarkapp.
Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter and being a Hookmark customer!
Yours truly,
Luc P. Beaudoin Co-founder, author, cognitive scientist and information-retrieval enthusiast CogSci Apps Corp.
Copyright © 2022 CogSci Apps Corp. All rights reserved.
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