It’s great that Hookmark works so well with Bookends. It’s two of my favourite (and most used) pieces of software cooperating - great!
One question I have, though, is whether it somehow possible to find out whether an entry / a reference in Bookends has a Hookmark link?
In the Apple Finder, e.g., I can set a tag to be automatically added when a Hookmark exists for that file or folder, and that gives me a visual hint. It would be great to have something similar in Bookends, such as a new column that one could switch on in the main view if one were interested to find Hookmarked Bookends entries - and / or the possibility to search for them with “Find…”.
Jon from Bookends tells me that the software doesn’t have access to Hookmark data, and that therefore such “marking” would have to be done on the Hookmark side. He says that he could imagine using an AppleScript to add a keyword to such references (e.g. hookmarked) that could then be searched for in Bookends (or created a smart group for).
After originally asking my question there, I follow Jon’s suggestion and ask this here on the Hookmark forum and hope for insights.
It is possible to find out whether a reference in Bookends has a Hookmark link or not using AppleScript. Here is a sample script:
tell application "Hookmark"
set b1 to make bookmark with properties {address:"bookends://sonnysoftware.com/ref/Library1/25475", name:"Attached file Calculus.pdf"}
set b2 to make bookmark with properties {address:"https://www.test.com", name:"test"}
hook b1 and b2
hooked bookmarks of b2
end tell
Thank you for your example, @bchend. However, this is not what I am looking for. I am looking for a quick way to find out in Bookends whether a reference has a Hookmark attached to it or not. That would be most helpful, @LucB.
How about Hookmark’s menu bar icon? Cf. In the top right corner of the screenshot below, you can tell that the selected reference has exactly one “hook” (a bidirectional link)
Thank you, @LucB - it’s so obvious that it didn’t occur to me to look there!
However, two points:
Hookmark takes some time to display it, but more importantly
I still need to activate a reference to see whether it has a Hookmark link.
So if I - for example - want to check which of the articles I need to read / excerpt for a piece I am writing already have a Hookmark link pointing me to my reading notes, it would be preferable to have something that I can see on the Bookends main screen - such as a separate column - or a label that would automatically be set if a reference has a Hookmark.
Happy to hear more is coming! Hookmark is a key feature of my workflows.
One solution might be to have Hookmark add a color label to a reference when it was hooked, via AppleEvents. But no doubt many users wouldn’t want this, and even those that did might have a color preference, this would probably require a user-settable option. I don’t speak for Hookmark, but I suspect that’s far too app-specific for an app-agnostic universal tool .
Is this already in the Bookends AppleScript dictionary? (I haven’t checked). If so, then we do this kind of thing (at least optionally) with Finder, OmniFocus, DEVONthink (adding tags). Hookmark’s integration script can be updated to do that, and the configuration could be put in the script. Hookmark Pro users can update integrations. We can add a boolean at the top of the script to make it easy for users to do that.
the framework is app agnostic, but each app can have its own Get Address integration script. We’ve created one for Bookends, so changing it would not be that hard.
In future we would like to provide a UI to expose some of the AppleScript parameters/variables that are in the integrations, so that users don’t need to mess with the AppleScript (we’d start with the booleans → checkboxes). If other users want this for their scripts please chime in. (E.g., our Obsidian scripts have several options per Using Hookmark with Obsidian – Hookmark ).
I have not used the Bookends tag feature. But if Bookends has an AppleScript to set the tag of a reference, and if one can view the tag as a column in Bookends, would that do the trick?
Yes, you can set a reference’s label via AS using “label color”. Also, the user can have any field in Bookends appear as a column. So for example, if the field User4 was used to store a string indicating the reference was hooked, it could be displayed in the multi-column view.
This is all very useful. Since Hookmark started working with Bookends I’ve used a rubbish method of pasting a icon in the top of the notes field (a hangover from when I left myself a note if a book was in kindle or calibre rather than on my shelf). Recently I started using a colour label for hooked items because it’s such a pain to keep opening the notestream to look (like @abusch it didn’t occur to me to look at the menu icon ), but I then have conflicts with other colour labels. I hadn’t thought about displaying a field as a column and making use of a user-defined field.
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icon in the top of the notes field (a hangover from when I left myself a note if a book was in kindle or calibre rather than on my shelf). Recently I started using a colour label for hooked items because it’s such a pain to keep opening the notestream to look (like 
), but I then have conflicts with other colour labels. I hadn’t thought about displaying a field as a column and making use of a user-defined field.