Merging, meshing, grouping, gather, clustering…. these are key issues, and it’s one of the more mind-bending parts of thinking about how to use Hook. I’m delighted to see the automatic tagging, but that doesn’t really address this issues. The key issue is how to connect a new item to other items that are already connected; that is where the talk of “groups” or “accumulators” comes in. And this is crucial.
Use case: After I’ve linked 10 PDFs for a research project, and a day later I come across another PDFs that I would like to be linked to the others (meshed?), in just the way that they are to one another, how do I do that?
More generally, there seem to be three approaches one could take, and I’m a bit confused about which is actually being taken:
- The “tag” model: on this approach, Hook links items in virtue of a shared bit of metadata (which could be the property "is linked to the file “My Great Novel.pages”). When you later want to add a new For a new item, you assign that property to the new item.
- A “hub-and-spoke” approach, where there is a designated “hub file” at the center of the links to which everything for that project is related. If that were the approach, then I would want to have every linked item be able to reveal what the hub is, and then
- A “project container” model, where linking A, B, and C amount to putting aliases of A,B, and C in a single container.
Hook seems so sophisticated that it wouldn’t surprise me to hear you say that it’s none of the three. But it would be useful for better understanding how one can ensure that new items get connected in the desired way to the previously linked items.
Hope this is useful, at least as a question that other noobies may have!