Hookmark has a much longer history than most people realize. Its origins go back well before the first public beta, which we released on January 24, 2014—exactly 30 years after Apple’s famous “1984” Macintosh commercial. Years earlier, while leading the development of gStudy at Simon Fraser University as part of the Learning Kit project, I […]
Why We Built Hookmark: The Meta-Access Problem Read More »
Hookmark 7.2 is available: improved Context window, RELATED section of the window (with pages related to the current PDF), new integrations, and more. Read about it here. Join the discussion on the forum, here.
Here’s a copy of a newsletter we sent today to all Hookmark customers because it contains an urgent update. In this newsletter: Urgent: Please update to Hookmark 7.02 David Sparks’ Robot Assistant Field Guide Clean My Links Automate Hookmark files with Hazel Tip: How to hide Hookmark window at launch TidBITS interview of me re
Update to 7.0.2; David Sparks’ new Field Guide; Clean My Links; and Hazel Read More »
Our software company is called CogSci Apps for a reason: our software is designed with cognitive science in mind. Following Donald Schön, we recognize that one cannot directly infer engineering (or psychotherapy) from science—but one can design better systems by using science as a guiding resource.
Cognitive Science Helps Us Design Great Software Read More »
If you’ve ever copied a link and noticed it looks like this… https://www.amazon.ca/Enshittification-Everything-Suddenly-Worse-About/dp/0374619328/ref=sr_1_1?dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9._SjOlLplb7Z0Rvscl1ZihXsKv3j5PVjTYExbZMJmZuDtJLCIavbyJiKbtQJUy3Xn0bNemqglamuZWtNQzFB2_Q.x7nWZNgrA7o7I-w9roq4O53Ys4E1Wx9KWxrJHyQb-aY&dib_tag=se&gad_source=1&hvadid=788657704505&hvdev=c&hvexpln=0&hvlocphy=9001509&hvnetw=g&hvocijid=17902577840324087743–&hvqmt=b&hvrand=17902577840324087743&hvtargid=kwd-2078990547242&hydadcr=22430_13682881&keywords=enshittification&mcid=82e56b35149932d7aa07352f600aa68d&qid=1768014783&sr=8-1 …you’ve seen link junk (also called URL cruft)—tracking parameters added by websites, advertisers, and social platforms. These parameters don’t help the reader. They exist to track you. They also: clutter your links break readability make URLs fragile leak information when you share
The Best Ways to Clean Tracking Junk from URLs (2026 Guide) Read More »
Links are the connective tissue of knowledge work. But most of the links we copy and share today are… a mess. They’re bloated with tracking parameters, session tokens, referral junk, and opaque identifiers—what we might simply call URL cruft. This cruft makes links: harder to read less trustworthy less stable and frankly, less pleasant to
Clean My Links™: Make Every Link You Share Better Read More »
