I’m intrigued by Hook, but am just starting to “kick the tires”. One question I have is, are people using Hook to store their browser bookmarks? Currently I store bookmarks in pinboard.in then use Alfred to search/access them. Can I replace that functionality with Hook? Should I?
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I’ve had a Pinboard account for several years, and I have been using Hook for a short while. I wouldn’t dream of trying to replace Pinboard with Hook, but I suppose it depends on what you do with Pinboard. To me they fulfil totally different functions. Pinboard, for me, is a repository of things I want to remember, or need to record the source of. The fact that it also has full text search (if you pay the subscription) means that it is also a way of finding material. Hook is for linking items to each other – and sometimes very disparate items – for example linking a pdf to an email, or an item in a task manager. To me this is useful because when I am working on something, I can rapidly find “stuff” that is connected with the task at hand, no matter where it is on my hard drive (or on the web, in the case of internet-based material). And of course a single pdf might be connected with multiple different things I am working on – and I can Hook to it as many times as I want from as many different places as I want. As I say, it depends on what you are doing with Pinboard, and how you use it.
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Welcome to the Hook Productivity Forum , @cjs226 . And thanks for asking
Basically, Hook follows the 
philosophy of playing nice with others, including other information management tools. Hook is designed to help users get more out of their favorite apps/services.
See Automation – Hook for ways of using Hook with launchers. More to come on that soon.
In the next release of Hook we will show major new ways of using Hook with Pinboard. The development of this major release is wrapping up.
To add to my prior answer: whenever you process a URL with Hook, it adds a bookmark for it. That means you can find it later via Hook’s search tool. Pinboard has a tag and note field that Hook does not yet have. And Pinboard makes your bookmarks available from iOS whereas Hook is not yet on iOS (our iOS app is still in the works).
However, with Hook, you don’t have to remember to bookmark something. It’s automatically bookmark whenever you Copy Link, Copy Markdown Link, Hook to Copied Link or Hook to New — which are all signals of relevance.
E.g., if I share a link with Hook, or just copy a link into my task manager, that implicitly signals “hey, this is worth bookmarking”.
Personally, I use Pinboard , Hook and a launcher. Having said that, many of the things I used to do with Pinboard and a launcher I now do with Hook. Hook’s bookmark search tool is surprising useful for rapidly surfacing pertinent information.
We’ll have some pertinent / surprising new information to share in April on the subject, with the next major release of Hook.
Been looking to better understand the use case of marrying Hook to Pinboard and now I see. That’s a helpful way to describe it, imo, @LucB.
– Robert
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