Hook Update: Craft, GoodTask, PDF software, Screencasts

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One of the great joys we have at CogSci Apps is interacting with leading developers who, by making their software’s data linkable via automation and an apt user interface, show that they value what David Sparks calls contextual computing and Seth Godin calls minimizing mode switching.

Keep reading to learn about Hook’s integrations with Craft, GoodTask, PDF software, and more. Plus, we’re pleased to share new screencasts and other information to help you learn to stay focused while doing your deep work with your favorite Mac apps.

Craft : A fresh, linkable take on writing

Craft is a delightful new writing app for Mac, iPhone & iPad. As soon as Craft was released, we started hearing great things about it from our users, along with requests to be able to link Craft documents to anything with Hook. The Craft developers deeply value linking; they provide document links and deep links both in their app’s user interface and through automation. Their linking automation uses x-callback-url, meaning they didn’t need to use AppleScript or JavaScript to make Craft linkable through automation.

We’re pleased to state that Hook is compatible with Craft! We recommend:

GoodTask: A linkable task manager based on iOS Reminders and Calendars

ha ha interactive is another Mac developer that values contextual computing through hyperlinking. They develop the GoodTask task manager app, which adds functionality to Apple’s Reminders and Calendars apps.

Hook is compatible with GoodTask’s Reminders. To learn more,

PDF linking

Whether they are academics, researchers, writers, lawyers and/or developers, knowledge workers often delve deeply into PDFs. To better support them, we have again extended the reach of Hook’s deep PDF-linking. We introduced deep linking for Skim. We have improved support for deep linking with PDFpenPro Pro by Smile. We’ve added support for Adobe Acrobat document-based linking. Moreover, Hook 2.3 will add deep PDF linking support in the context of Adobe Acrobat. Hook’s deep PDF linking uses standard PDF coordinates when possible, which means you can make deep links in one PDF app, and open them in another. There’s more information on Hook’s website.

Whole-document linking of many other PDF apps is also possible through Hook.

Many new screencasts for Hook

Lee Garrett of My Productive Mac has produced several great new screencasts to help you use Hook, and is working on more. Follow Lee @myproductivemac on Twitter.

Significant app updates, and upcoming localization

We love celebrating linkable apps. So we would like to draw your attention to recent significant updates to a couple of linkable apps from Germany. They are both apps that were linkable with Hook from day one:

Amongst other things, we are currently working on internationalization of Hook, including to German 😊.

Hook: effortless context-sensitive bookmarking

While Hook is marketed primarily as a contextual information-retrieval app, Hook has become an extremely efficient random information-access tool. Whether you use Hook’s Copy Link, Copy Markdown Link, Hook to Copied Link, Hook to New or menu bar linking, Hook automatically bookmarks the items you’re connecting. It turns out that each of these actions is a highly discriminative indicator of future relevance. And this is effortless! You don’t need to manually add bookmarks. But you can do so. For example, if you Copy Link on a web page or file, for your own use or to send to someone else, you’ve implicitly signaled that this page, amongst the terabytes of information you’ve accessed, is distinctively relevant. Use Hook’s find tool to quickly get back to that information.

Have you tried searching Hook’s bookmarks yet? You’ll find it is already unbelievably useful. Still, in Hook 2.3 and beyond, CogSci Apps will deliver more effortless bookmarking inventions. So please stay tuned.

Prior release notes

Our previous newsletter (Dec 29) announced Hook 2.2. On Hook’s website, you can access release notes for Hook 2.2.1 and Hook 2.2.2.

We update software integrations more often than the app itself. Release notes for Hook’s software integrations can be found in the “Latest Release” category of the Hook Forum.