Enable Disable Links

One thing that I have a hard time with is managing my organizational structures in general. I don’t have a clear suggestion as to how to do this in Hook. But it is something that I would like to imagine could be improved. That is, I would like to imagine this, but I don’t know how to suggest a way to do it.

Right now I am at a point where I have completed two phases of a project and merged them. That is a very good thing. Now, I am working on revisiting earlier attempts and working on that phase and eventually merging all of them into a single document.

I am sure I am not the only one who is challenged by the idea but, this is a time when I want to add in links to a new set of documents that I have to stay focused on for the time being. This is a time when I only want to see all the current phase documents I am working in. However, at the same time I do not want to start deleting my current project links as they are still very important and will be used after I have worked in this phase for a time.

In the past I have tried archiving a new NVAlt document and put archived links on a separate archived page. I am not sure this is the best solution over time. If I keep adding links into a Hook document, my Hook window can become unwieldy, especially f I am adding a lot of documents to the window.

I have somewhat addressed this in earlier posts but the idea is that, I need to organize my organizational structure. If I don’t it quickly becomes confusing an, unusable.

Ideas in this general direction, some already mentioned;

Having a way to declare sets of links so that I could stay focused on the links for the project but also be able to shut out the restoration of all those links that I want to keep around, but don’t want to see right now.

One idea for this comes from using filters in some photo editing software. In an old favorite app, LightZone, I could set up several filters and adjust them to taste. Each filter had a small check mark on a corner to enable or disable that filter. In this way you don’t have to delete the filter to test if the effect it was having was something you wanted to keep or not. KeyBoard Maestro also does this. It allows testing of each module piece by making each piece active or inactive in any work flow.

Perhaps something like this could also work in Hook? You could enable or disable links that you have hooked to a document but not actually have to delete the links if you just do not want them in you way in a current phase of the project.

You would need a stand alone window to affect such changes to your links. But in this idea, if you have a project set or, a Hook window with several links in it, you could check on or off those links you want to use in a phase of that project.

Or perhaps there is a more elegant way to programming this so that the sets and the sub sets are named.

I have already mentioned being able to sort the Hook window items by other than just alphabetical, including by kind, by date last used, date added, etc. Being tag aware in sorting might be nice too.

Hook is a great idea. But when you start trying to dig in to a project deeply and find you have many documents as well as different phases of a project with needing to only focus on certain sub sets, this is all I am saying, it would be nice to see this addressed in the future.