Today, I published a blog post about using MailMate and Hook together:
MailMate: Powerful, Flexible, Efficient, Standards Compliant, Secure and Markdown Enabled IMAP Email Client for Your Mac – Hook
I’m curious to know how our users will use Hook and MailMate together. If you have other tricks and tips about this, please feel feel to join this discussion.
Something didn’t work quite right here…
I created a note on an email last night, then today I visited selected the note in the finder and invoked hook to open the email in MailMate. It opens in a new window (as expected). But then when I accessed Hook, it didn’t show the link to the note.
I played around with it a bit more, creating a link to a new note from the same email window, it created a new note with the same name as the original note with " 1" appended to it. This file then showed up in hook when invoked from MailMate on that message window.
I deleted the note, and hook lost it (of course), but it still doesn’t seem to know about the original note - yet the original note still knows about the email.
Could you please specify the version of Hook? yesterday we introduced Hook 1.0-public beta (build 2058).
Also, what was the type of the original note (Word doc, Pages, etc.?). Is it possible that renamed or did a s Save As operation on the new note. Renaming a note should not break links, but an app in principle could create a new file in lieu of the original. We’ll publish a troubleshooting guide.
We’ve tried to replicate the problem and have not been able to.
Would be nice to see the version in the Update panel of preferences (although I suppose it comes up if you click Check Now).
I’m on Version 1.0-beta (2058)…
The original note was created using Hook and was a BBEdit document.
I just created the note with text “Testing”, saved and closed the doc.
I haven’t been able to replicate the problem either - just strange. If I notice it again I’ll let you know.
We still haven’t been able to replicate the problem. We have marked with our “watch” keyword, which we use to keep an eye on previously reported issues.
After Check Now, the version number shows up, but not the build. We’ll add the build number there. The version is in About, but it would make sense to put it in the Update panel too.
Hook and MailMate have in common a wonderful flexibility; they both seem to be examples of passionately designed (as opposed to purely commercial) software. Hook extends MailMate in several useful ways, as illustrated in Luc’s blog post linked above, but one further part of the puzzle needs to be put in place by the dev of MM: there is no way to tell in MM whether a message has a note or a link without invoking Hook. The user can manually tag messages, and even map a tag to a colour change, but it would be better if this was automatic. All that is needed is a new rule condition so that users can set up a rule to, say, colour the message blue when it has a Hook link associated with it.
This reflects a general issue (I won’t say “shortcoming”) of Hook, that links are invisible until you look for them. In most use-cases this is not a problem, but sometimes it would be nice to have a visual cue. This would be the responsibility of each host app however, and not something that Hook itself could implement.