DEVONThink users: how are you using Hookmark?

Discussion & Help
1

Hello everyone,

After a bit of a health hiccup, I am revisiting some of my workflows. I use DT3 fairly lightly. Most of my reference documents exist in DT DBs. Most of my notes and writing exist outside of the DT DBs and are indexed by DT. If a piece of writing or project is substantial enough and stable, it gets moved to the DT DB.

I am wondering why / how DT users use Hookmark given DT’s excellent linking capabilities.

Hookmark is a great application that I have thought about for a while, but given some health stuff haven’t gotten around to spending time with. And the trial period would never be enough time for me to play use cases. Care to help me better understand how it might be used to help me wrangle my information?

Thank you!

p.s. I searched around the forum and I didn’t find a general discussion about the uses cases, some troubleshooting, some particularly rarefied uses cases. If I missed such a post I apologize.

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Hi, I am using DT and Hookmark. For me, Hookmark comes into play when connecting several entries from DT and other sources. It is nice for collecting links from all kinds of sources at one place and don’t have to bother about which way to get the reference out of a certain Program. A nice bonus is the tagging, this way I stitch my hooks together which can be pointing to a note, a DT item, a mail, a website or whatever.

Just for DT it would not shine as much since DT has linking. Hookmark shines when the links are from several sources and need to be brought together.

My opinion.

BR AWD

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3

Thanks for your reply, would you mind providing a specific usecase?

4

For each Project, I am working on, I have a note in Apple Notes that works as a continuous project diary. Everything I have an important document like a PDF, Excel sheet, mail or whatever it is, and wherever it is (DT, SharePoint, mail app or in the internet), I create a link to it in Hookmark and post it in the note file at the corresponding date, and add a short reference text.

So when I look for something important I have everything referenced or written in the note file.

As I said, it doesn’t have much to do with DT. Hookmark just serves as a single universal linker. So I don’t have to care, if an app is capable of linking and how I can get the link out of it.

BR AWD

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5

It lets you link items other than Devonthink into the group, it gives you an interface to manage your links beyond just a line of text and it gives you two-directional links to find stuff outside Devonthink that’s linked to your DT item. I guess if I entirely lived in Devonthink it might not be worth paying for an additional service, but since i use DT alongside other apps, DT links alone aren’t any more a replacement than a website URL is a replacement.

6

Oh dear. Here I go.

I am writing my thesis in a mix of Tinderbox and DEVONthink. Tinderbox I use to glue it all together; I can organise the outline, work with arbitrary metadata, and do all kinds of weird document management.

But the actual writing is in Markdown files, in a directory indexed in DEVONthink. I tend to break writing into sections of multiple paragraphs. As they’re markdown on the filesystem, I can sync them to two things - DEVONthink To Go, on my ipad/iphone, and an SD card, which I can stick into a King Jim Pomera DM250.

In Tinderbox, I have a bunch of automation skimming my writing, looking for in-note metadata (“todo!” “followup!” “cite!”, blocks I mark out with {} and find easily later). I have an applescript which takes a note, maps it to a file in DEVONthink,. copies links both ways, and sets Tinderbox to auto-update the note from the DEVONthink database on change.

So there’s a degree of semi-automation going on there.

I use Hookmark to manually link the on-disk text file, DEVONthink database reference, and notes in the Tinderbox file all together. From there, I can pop to new tasks in Omnioutliner, references and sources online and in Bookends, and to tie together whatever ephemera I have.

My workflow is structured to use Tinderbox as the ‘glue’, DEVONthink as the synchronisation store, and markdown files on disk as the actual final writing. I have to do some updates to the script that holds it together to update content from TB to DT, if I change order (which rewrites numeric outline prefixes), but all in good time.

I have Hook to create Omnioutline tasks as the default “Hook to new…”, rather than markdown files, as you’d assume. It’s a neat way to link directly to things I have to complete later.

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