In traditional bookmark management apps, you need to add, remove, tag, and otherwise manipulate your bookmarks. And traditional bookmark manager apps tend to only bookmark web pages. And they don’t tend to maintain the context of or relationships between the items you bookmark.
Hookmark is a CogSci Apps invention, so it is different.
Hookmark is the world’s first (and still only) truly universal, effortless, contextual bookmarking software.
- Hookmark automatically bookmarks what you link.
- Hookmark can bookmark items in many apps (emails, files, DEVONthink, Craft, web pages, and much more).
- Hookmark shows you what you’ve hooked (bidirectionally linked) to the item you’ve selected in the current app (Mail, Finder, browser, etc.).
- Hookmark lets you navigate the network of bookmarks.
- Hookmark bookmarks are private.
- Hookmark lets you PIN your bookmarks.
- Hookmark shows you RECENT bookmarks.
- Hookmark enables you to TAG your bookmarks.
- Hookmark has a Bookmarks window, that has four tabs: ALL bookmarks, PINNED bookmarks, RECENT boomarks,and TAGGED bookmarks.
- Hookmark can automatically add bookmarks to:
That means you can access Hookmark’s web bookmarks from any of those products, on any device, iPhone, iPad, and (except for GoodLinks) even Windows.
Truly universal bookmarking
The traditional definition of “universal bookmarking” is seriously limited. It means to be able to bookmark web pages from any web browser. Now that is a good start. And of course Hookmark can do that too. But Hookmark can bookmark much more than web pages! In fact, Hookmark can bookmark anything that is truly linkable. If the information has a URL, Hookmark can bookmark it.
And for many resources that don’t have a decent URL scheme, Hookmark has you covered too! Hookmark has introduced major new bookmarking schemes. So with Hookmark, you can also robustly bookmark files, for instance. Move or rename the files? No problem. You can even bookmark email messages; heck, you can even switch email apps at a later point and the bookmarks will still work.
Check out this partial list of apps whose data Hookmark can bookmark. But keep in mind, as long as the resource has a URL scheme (or Hookmark has added one for you), Hookmark can bookmark it!
Effort-free (automatic) bookmarking
Traditional bookmarking software is meant to help you find information later. But in fact, most of the information you want to find is not bookmarked by that software. Why? Because: (a) traditional software only bookmarks web pages (not tasks, files, emails, etc.); and (b) you’re unlikely to remember to bookmark information! It’s not that you “forgot”, it’s that you were busy getting your task done, and not thinking about information management.
With traditional bookmarking software you need to remember to bookmark information. And you need to manually add bookmarks! That means: (a) you will forget to bookmark stuff; and (b) if you do manually bookmark something, you’ve consumed your brain’s precious “working memory” resources and interrupted your flow.
In contrast, Hookmark automatically bookmarks any link you copy or hook! That is the general philosophy of Hookmark, which also shines in its Hook to New feature: make it effort-free.
And guess what?
Contextual: Copying links and hooking them are signals of information relevance
Whenever you copy a link or hook it to something, Hookmark understands that amongst the googolplex of information, that link information is something you will likely want to retrieve later. So Hookmark bookmarks it automatically, so you don’t even need to think about it.
Technically, this means that Hookmark’s bookmark database is a focused goldmine! Hookmark’s bookmarks are extremely discriminative compared to, say, a search index. A traditional search index (like Spotlight) mostly contains junk that you will never, ever want to retrieve. That means no matter how sophisticated the search engine’s sorting algorithm is, it’s going to have difficulty presenting you with the information that is most relevant to you. Therefore, you —your brains, your eyes, your fingers— will need to do the work: you will scan through lots of irrelevant information. Search tools waste your time, tire you out, and interfere with your flow.
Hookmark is different. Here’s a typical scenario: with Hookmark’s Copy Link (⌘C) command, you instantly copy a fully formatted web link and send it to your friend. The odds of you needing that information again in the future are much more than random bits of information indexed by a search tool (like Spotlight). Hookmark’s search algorithm is already pre-filtered. Plus, it’s got lots of other strategies that are only possible with Hookmark (because Hookmark is unique).
Bookmarks window
Hookmark’s Bookmarks window is where you can see all your bookmarks.
You can access Hookmark’s bookmarks window by typing ⌃B in the Hookmark context window, or clicking on the Bookmarks window button in the context window, or in the menu bar window.
The bookmarks window has four handy sections:
- PINNED
- ALL
- RECENT
- TAGS
PINNED bookmarks
In addition to be able to search for bookmarks, Hookmark has a PINNED section, which enables you to put your most relevant bookmarks right in front of you. This enables you to resume working on a project at any point.
No need to bring up a separate app. The Hookmark Bookmarks window has you covered.
You can easily hide and show this window.
RECENT bookmarks
Every resourceful macOS app is supposed to have a RECENT File menu item. But those items just deal with the specific app’s content.
Hookmark is different. Hookmark is a truly universal information manager. It can contain links to anything!
The Hookmark window has a RECENT items section that contains one bookmark for anything you’ve recently accessed.
This too helps you regain flow. Suppose you were deep in thought, and got sidetracked by an urgent email. You’ve lost your train of thought. When you are ready to get back on track, just invoke Hookmark and check out the RECENT items section. If you’re a habitual Hookmark user, you will quickly be able to get back into flow. One of the RECENT items will be right there. Double-click on it, and you’re back on track.
But manually adding bookmarks is also possible
Hookmark is super versatile. So of course it contains a manual Add Bookmark command, for rare cases where you want to manually add the bookmark without doing anything else.
Browse your bookmarks in Hookmark
Hookmark contains a powerful search tool to find just the right resource you need.
Having said that, most of the time, rather than search in Hookmark, you will simply invoke Hookmark’s contextual window to directly see the information that is ‘hooked’ to it, or that you have Pinned or Recently accessed.
Rename your bookmarks in context
When you access a bookmark in Hookmark (whether it is HOOKED, PINNED, RECENT or a search result), you can conveniently rename it in place with Hookmark’s Rename in Hookmark command. You don’t need to locate the bookmark in a search tool, and this does not affect the original. You can also Revert Name in Hookmark.
Navigate bookmarks, and do so much more…
Hookmark has all kinds of commands that work on all its bookmarks. See All Commands & Shortcuts.
Hookmark also makes other linkable software work better for you, including bookmark managers
So, if you subscribe to Instapaper, GoodLinks, or Pinboard, then Hookmark can automatically add bookmarks to those products too! If enabled, then every time Hookmark adds a web bookmark to its own database, it will add a bookmark to the other software too. If the other software supports caching of pages, then that software may cache the page too.
That can make the web bookmarks you create with Hookmark available on iPhone and iPad.
This is configured in Hookmark’s Preferences > Services tab.
If you’re using Pinboard, then Hookmark can also tag the page with “from:Hook”.
Hookmark for iPhone and iPad – Hookmark
See Hookmark for iPhone and iPad – Hookmark
Sync all Hookmark’s bookmarks to DEVONthink, see them on iPhone and iPad
Zsolt Benke has written a script to Archive Hookmark bookmarks with DEVONthink.
Zsolt writes:
In conjunction with DEVONthink, we can archive our bookmarks from Hook and save them as Pinboard does. I made a script for this a while back and it’s really helpful. It runs once a week, archives all websites from my Hook database into DEVONthink.
This functionality is also discussed on the Hookmark Forum.
This means that you can access Hookmark’s bookmarks on any iPhone or iPad if you also use DEVONthink and enable DEVONthink’s sync.