Hookmark 6.8 with Linkding Bookmarking, mySleepButton and more

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Hookmark 6.8 integrating with Linkding bookmarking service

Hookmark 6.8 is now available as a download and in-app update. It integrates with the Linkding bookmarking service and fixes several bugs.

Linkding is a free, self-hosted, praiseworthy alternative to Pinboard (and to Pocket, Instapaper, and GoodLinks.) Linkding is particularly relevant because Pinboard has been stagnant for many years. Some features gleaned from its home page:

  • Focused. Optimized for readability, allowing to quickly add and find bookmarks without distractions.
  • Customizable. Features can be enabled or disabled as needed, adjustable UI through a number of settings.
  • Metadata. Automatically fetches titles, descriptions, icons and preview images of bookmarked websites.
  • Archiving. Automatically create snapshots of bookmarked websites, either as local HTML file or on the Internet Archive
  • Bulk editing. Apply any operation to a selection of bookmarks or the whole collection
  • Import / Export. Import and export bookmarks in the Netscape HTML format.
  • Multi-User. Supports multiple users, with the ability to share bookmarks with other users or guests.

and more.

Hookmark automatically bookmarks any resource it touches through its Copy Link, Copy As Markdown Link, and Hook to Copied Link commands. You can now configure Hookmark to automatically add Linkding bookmarks to any bookmark of a webpage that you touch with Hookmark. Hookmark won’t add non-http(s) bookmarks to bookmarking services. Use Hookmark’s Setting > Services tab and the Tags settings tab to configure integration with bookmarking services like Linkding.

I’d like to thank Brett Terpstra who brought Linkding to my attention.

Future bookmarking enhancements

We plan to add deeper integration with bookmarking services, such as the ability to sync tags between Hookmark and your configured bookmarking service(s), and having a new markdown-enabled description field for each bookmark.

We’d like Hookmark to integrate with the Rainbow.io bookmarking app, i.e., to allow Hookmark’s Context window to be populated in context of the Rainbow app, but (a) Rainbow does not have an API for this; (b) it is not consistently possible to select a bookmark in Rainbow: clicking a link tends to open the bookmark’s target resource. We’ve contacted the developer a couple of times about this but have not had a response. Maybe users of Rainbow would have better luck.

We’ll have a look at integrating with Rainbow as a service, the way we do with Linkding, GoodLinks and other bookmarking services. But first we’re looking into integrating with the Pocket bookmarking service.

If there are other ways in which you’d like Hookmark’s bookmarking to be enhanced, please share your suggestions with us on the Hookmark forum or via other channels.

Companion for iPhone and iPad

We had planned to release Hookmark Companion for iPhone and iPad this quarter but decided to make some more pre-launch changes first. We’re quite confident the Companion will launch in Q2. Meanwhile, if you want to join the beta, just get in touch with us; in your communication, please include an email address registered with Apple, and your Hookmark discourse forum handle handle

In the App Store, this companion app will simply be called Hookmark. Its tagline is Companion for iPhone and iPad. Initially, due to sandboxing limitations, there will be no management of hook://file/ links. However, in later iterations of the Companion, we plan to work around some of the limitations. For instance, there will be an option to show hook://file/ links. To use such a link, you’d first need to grant Hookmark permission on a per-link or per folder basis.

Users who join the Companion’s TestFlight program gain access to a private forum on which they can discuss the app and post bug reports and feature requests.

Updates licenses and subscriptions

Hookmark is not offered on a pure subscription model. Instead, the original license you purchase is valid forever and includes the right to access updates released within the year. After the year is over, you can, at your discretion, purchase an Updates license, which extends your rights for another year from the time you first activate the Updates license.

The Updates licenses help us pay our various costs including customer support. We tend to respond within 12 hours, 7 days a week, whether you email us or post something on the forum.

In the second quarter of this year we intend to offer, in addition, a pure monthly/yearly subscription model. That will enable users to skip the initial Pro or Standard license purchase, and access Hookmark Pro for a monthly or annual fee. We’ll announce this in this newsletter and our other channels.

We greatly appreciate your patronage!

How could we have improved your onboarding experience?

Hookmark is a tool that some people immediately understand, whereas some equally intelligent people take a while to understand. This is partly because it is such a unique app; e.g., no other app extends the foreground window like Hookmark does. To facilitate onboarding, we have made many improvements over the years. However, if you have suggestions for what could have made understanding Hookmark quicker/easier for you, we would love to hear from you about them. It could be changes in the app itself, help pages, videos, or other website improvements.

Losing sleep?

Has anything been causing you to lose sleep? If so, you can try the cognitive shuffle for insomnolence, which I invented years ago. It has consistently been in the news over the last 11 years. (E.g., in this New York Times article which was published last week, this BBC Science Focus article in February, and this TikTok video by Dr. Scott Walter which has has garnered over 600k likes.)

You can do the cognitive shuffle yourself without using our app. But it’s easier to use our mySleepButton app, to shuffle your thoughts to sleep.

My academic colleagues and I have done a few empirical tests of this technique. (I’m an Adjunct Professor at Simon Fraser University.) And we have a paper coming out later this year on the cognitive shuffle, which will be published by Cambridge University Press in a Sleep Theories book edited by Daniel Kay). Follow me on X or Mastodon if you’d like to know when the preprint is available.

Useful blog post on Hookmark

The Useful Tech which has 67K Followers on Medium has posted about Hookmark: The Mac Productivity App You’ve Never Heard Of That Saves Me Hours Every Week | by The Useful Tech

The Omni Group is adding document links to its apps!

On its blog announcing its 2025 product road map, The Omni Group has a long section on Document Links which it is adding to its iPhone, iPad and macOS apps. Well worth reading about.

The Omni Group writes:

We were one of the initial signers of the Linking Manifesto: we know how important it is to easily link to things, and we’ve long supported links within all our apps.

Bravo!

Valediction

Thanks for reading! You can stay up to date by following us on Mastodon or X.

Have a great spring!

Luc P. Beaudoin
on behalf of CogSci Apps Corp.