Managing sets of linked items

Apologies if this was asked and answered elsewhere.

I’m not sure what a set of items linked with Hook is a called – but let’s say it’s a “group”.

  1. Is there an index or search that will let me locate the starting point for group that I created previously? “I know I read an article about cognitive science, and had a group of notes documents, and I want to find that article and its group in Hook.”
  2. Is there a way to delete the group’s links en bloc? “OK, I’m finished with the group, and I want to clear out the links all at once.”
  3. Is there a way to remove one or more links from a group? “These two documents are not relevant to the group, I want to delete their links.”
1 Like

Thanks for asking.

Regarding search: Hook can automatically Finder-tag linked files with a custom tag (default: “Hook”), so you can find all your linked items.

There are no groups yet. We do plan to support a notion of projects. And there is mesh-linking via the menu bar icon (with more to come).

We also plan more visualization options. We have a very interesting product road map. But we also want to hear from users like you , to help us prioritize.

1 Like

Thank you @LucB. I’m not a fond user of Finder tags (too much infojunk), but I could use that feature as an interim.

Searching and curating meshes / groups (add/delete/re-home links) would be my priority. I can see the number of meshes growing rather quickly.

Very interesting application, Hook. Thank you for developing it.

1 Like

We also intend to make the ACCESS LINKED ITEMS section of the window hierarchical, so you can navigate like in Finder column view. I posted about related visualization features this morning.

I’m not sure where to find that posting.

+1 on a feature that allow to check and see a registry of links in order to both curate them and locate/organise them problem. I think this application solve a major problem which is on the information collection side, but if only would be able to track links between items, changes and maybe help organise them (tags or context?) would be great! :slight_smile:

Only way to remove a link is pressing ⌘ ⌫

But an option using CTRL-click (contextual menu) or a delete button would be great.

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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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
  3. 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!

In a nutshell,

  1. ultimately Hook links individual resources bidirectionally. However, Hook enables users to quickly create a network (mesh or hub and spoke). But Hook does not maintain a model of the network.
  2. Hook can also generate URI’s, with the hook:// scheme. Those URI’s are unidirectional, in that Hook does not track where you use them. But once you have created the URI, Hook will serve them.

(Of course, Hook also enables users to get the URI of resources that have their own URI scheme, such as https:// and OmniFocus:// . The design principle there is: if there is an existing scheme that meets the requirements of Hook, Hook will use that. The file:// scheme does not meet our requirements, which is why we invented hook://file (“file” here is a scheme extension).

As noted elsewhere, Hook also can apply Finder tags, but those tags are not used by Hook at the moment.

Hook is designed to fill a tight cluster of requirements that no other app has addressed. We’re currently extending documentation, which I hope will help.

Technically should not be the same to have a bidirectional relationship between one hook registry (a hook item which is itself a registry) and each of the element of that registry? it would still be bidirectional, but between one file and one container, and not between two files. In this way it would be possible to create n-ary relationship

For the record, there’s now also discussion of mesh linking here: Another request for creating a “mesh” of links - Hook Feature Requests - Hook Productivity Forum