It would be a nice idea to consider building some sort of a small database or background app with Hook that could manage links in the background.
I like the idea of Hook very much. But I am thinking that some of what I see as its shortcomings, might be helped greatly if Hook was always running a small app in the background that kept track of the links.
Some benefits of a background Hook application;
Every Hook link could be continually monitored in the app so that when you click on the link, Hook doesn’t have to take any time to look for and verify the link. Every link would already be verified by the background app before you selected it so every link choice would be instantaneous.
You could sort the links the way you wanted to, by kind, by date added, by tags, etc. Hook currently sorts alphabetically. I find it a bit annoying that my eyes tend to search for documents by type in a Hook menu. This is especially true when I am trying different versions and making revisions on a document. Other times I want to look to the top of the Hook menu to find the documents I have added into the linked set most recently. And, at other times, I want to see the top of the Hook menu show the files I have most recently worked on, that is, the links most recently clicked on.
You could edit and maintain your links without triggering the Hook menu every time.
You could copy a single Hook links and paste it - or move it altogether to a different Hook grouping of links. Right now the only way to copy a single Hook link is to, a) copy all links to paste into another document and then spend extra time deleting the links you didn’t want to copy over or, b) open the link, select the document, and copy a link from that open document to paste where you want it to go. It would be much easier when you have a single link that you want to copy to other sets, to have away to copy just that link without having to open its document first.
You could gather sets of links such as research so that if you wanted to plug into that set of links in the future, you would have to try and remember what documents held the links. The Hook background app would allow you to look through your link sets.
Thanks, @levelbest. There are quite a few different things in this topic.
The bulk of what you’ve requested seems be a request for a linking window that is always visible. This has been requested in the past and serves a number of purposes. Much of the functionality you discussed could potentially be achieved by providing an option for the current Hook window to be always visible, and for this window to be enhanced in various ways, some of which were discussed previously on the forum, others are yet to come.
This part of your request is dissociable from the bulk of what you seem to be asking for (i.e., “always visible”), evidence being that Hook already does various forms of asynchronous dependency maintenance. Your assumption that it doesn’t is a testimonial to the efficiency of our algorithms (i.e., not draining CPU in the background)-- I will pass on my gratitude to our developers for this. I will not dwell on the implementation details because implementation details are implementation details. Moreover, these implementation details are bound to change as the scope of Hook’s functionality unfolds. What will not change is our concern for efficiency, robustness and predilection towards avoiding false positives (displaying links to files that no longer exist). There’s a balancing act with respect to when and how much checking is done. As noted in your other comments on checking, we will keep efficiency in our list of concerns, knowing that there are all kinds of configurations out there (including slower Macs and spinning drives).
Coming back to the Hook window, it will continue to evolve, e.g., as early as 1.2 and 1.3 which are coming soon. I realize it’s hard from the outside to guess what the Hook window should be like, not knowing the product road map; but I appreciate the requests which we always consider – the details of our map are not set in stone.
I did not mean to cast aspersions on the efficiency of how Hook has been designed. That was not my intention. I was only trying only to offer an idea stemming from our recent transactions about how NVAlt delays populating the menu at times and how there seems to be a definite pause when a mounted external drive needs to spin up that has been in sleep mode. My apologies if I offended in any way.
I was not at all offended, @levelbest. Sorry if I sounded defensive. It was just a tongue in cheek way of complementing the development team while describing how it works. I’m enjoying the conversation. And I do sincerely want to emphasize our concern for efficiency. As I might have mentioned in another topic (can’t recall now) I have a lot of admiration for how in successive releases of OS X, Apple kept making the OS smaller and faster, and release cycles tightened to a year, while Windows got slower and fatter and its release cycles dragged on.