Hook 3.9 available with additional Finder integration

While working on Hook 4, we have now made Hook Version 3.9 (4960) available for download.

Hook 3.9 provides additional integration between Finder and Hook, thanks to a new Shortcuts action in Hook and a couple of very handy new Shortcuts that you can download:

Download, extract and open these shortcuts to make them available to you.

In the Shortcuts app (details pane), you can add these Shortcuts to the menubar, and to the Finder’s “Quick Actions” menu. That gives you yet another way to use Hook’s functions on selected files in Finder without needing to use Hook’s contextual popup-window. All you need to do is control click on the selected files, and choose the shortcut you want from the Finder’s Quick Action popup menu.

Shortcuts integration requires at least macOS 12.

Hook 3.9 also contains other improvements. For more information, see Hook 3.9 Release Notes, which also has a link to the direct download.

This build will soon also be available as an in-app.

Eligibility for updates

Hook software updates are free to any Hook CogSci Apps customer with a Hook Updates license that was valid at the time the update was released. Hook Pro and Hook Essentials each come with one year of free access to software updates.

If your Hook Updates license has expired and you apply this update, please note that Hook will revert to Lite mode until you purchase and apply an Updates license. However, you can also revert to a previous version of Hook that was released during your Updates License period. Upgrading from Essentials to Pro includes an additional 12-month Updates license.

Hello @LucB - long time user of Hook/Hookmark and have loved the app ever since it was released and have upgraded my licenses to the latest ones. Thank you for such a wonderful app.

I really got excited looking at the many to many relationship and then realized it only works with Finder items. Are there any plans to extend this to everything (URL, PDF etc)? My use case is something like - while researching, I come across several URLs, several PDFs, several word docs and emails and I’d absolutely love all of these to be linked together, such that when I invoke Hookmark on any of the URLs or PDFs or related emails, I can get to all the rest of the files from there.

Thank you.

1 Like

Thanks for the kind remarks, @pralayb .

It’s still actually just a collection of two way links, which are called “hooks”. What we’ve recently done with Shortcuts is make it easier to set up a bunch of two-way links in Finder. This currently also supports non-file links that are linked to a bunch of file links,

  1. Copy Link to anything (e.g., email , web page, x-devonthink-item URL item, OmniFocus item)
  2. select a bunch of files.
  3. select the Mesh Link action

Multi-select across other apps can be done with additional shortcuts or AppleScript if the other files support it. We invite automator enthusiasts to contribute shortcuts, and we too will add other shortcuts.

There is the menu bar icon for hooking stuff. And we intend to provide extra “GUI sugar” in the future.

We are well into Hookmark 5 and 5.1 which have a lot of new features. We’ll add some new URL features that have never been seen before – but we know they will be super useful for pain points people have experienced (but no one to my knowledge had expressed the general solution before).

Thank you for your response @LucB - which doing this thru shortcuts is certainly helpful, I was hoping that the feature could be brought onto Mac/desktop just the way other actions are available (without shortcuts). I am a developer by profession and being able to mesh-link multiple files (of different kinds) thru a keyboard-focussed (hotkeys/key combinations) is very helpful since it allows one to remain in the flow (instead of having to fire shortcuts app, and clicking buttons etc.).

Are there any plans to bring the many-to-many relationships natively to Mac (i.e. without the need to use shortcuts or scripts) anytime soon? (P.S Pleaaaaaase make it a menu option in the context menu :slight_smile: )

yes, that’s on the horizon. But we are working within the macOS ecosystem. Shortcuts and QuickActions are standards way of providing functionality. We do want to make it easier for people to install Shortcuts. But macOS does not give us a lot of options. It will continue to be faster for us to add functionality to Hookmark via Shortcuts, without making Hookmark UI too complex.

Having said that, again: yes we will continue to extend the Hookmark UI while not letting it become overwhelming. Hookmark 5 takes some more steps.

meanwhile:

Users can assign keyboard shortcuts to Shortcuts:

Run a shortcut while working on your Mac - Apple Support (CA) :

Run a shortcut from a keyboard shortcut

  1. Setup: In the Shortcuts app on your Mac, double-click a shortcut, click , click Add Keyboard Shortcut, then press a key combination.To remove the keyboard shortcut you added, click the “Run with” field, then press Delete.
  2. Run the shortcut: In any app in macOS, press the key combination.

Note: Some keyboard shortcuts are reserved for system use and cannot be overridden.

Very easy to do from Shortcuts app.