I am an academic, and just finished attending a professional conference, during which I collected a set of Apple Notes, Safari web pages, PPT and other files, photos, etc.
It would be absolutely amazing to be able to Hook all of these things to a TOPIC, instead of to each other. I suppose that a current workaround is to just create a dummy txt file on the desktop or something, but that feels incomplete, and if I accidentally deleted that file and broke the links I’d be heartbroken. Is this possible? If not, I vote to please make this a thing! Thanks.
Edit: There is another (in my opinion clumsier) app that does allow “linking” files (I think it copies them) to a topic. This is rudimentary and I like Hook’s potential for this much better, but is likely what I’ll use until Hook offers this feature.
Seems to me what you are requesting could be done if Hook had tags and a tag browser, right. That is on the horizon, but not likely in the current calendar year.
Incidentally, that is not a concern with Hook. Hook is designed to be able to deal with files that come and go (e.g., with version control systems [whether Git, SVN , whatever], cloud software (e.g., Dropbox, iCloud), network volumes, disk images (.dmg’s), removable storage, whatever. So your Hook bookmark would still be there. So you could put your files in a topic folders, and even nest them. Hook knows about file nesting.
If a file is deleted, you could find the bookmark, and use Copy All Links on it, and re-apply that to some other file (or other object for that matter).
There might be some more natural app with objects that could be hubs for hook linking.
Of course, using an outside-of-hook hub is not the same as having the categories built into Hook itself. There are trade-offs.
I think you are correct that Hooking to a tag would be great, especially if I could give that tag its own custom name.
Thank you for the tip about Hook links persisting through file deletion, for now I may then just use the method of having a dummy txt file serve as a topic’s “tag”.
Given the current limitation of using a file as a central hub instead of a “topic”, is it possible to keep a link in the clipboard after Hooking it to a file?
For example, as I mentioned above I have many files that I now want to Hook to a “conference” topic. Is it possible to keep the copied link in the clipboard after Hooking to the first file, so that I can quickly link all of those files to the same topic?
Pinboard is a bookmarking tool that supports tags. Each tag has a URI, like this: Pinboard: bookmarks for USERNAME tagged ‘TAGNAME’ → [Pinboard: bookmarks for USERNAME tagged 'TAGNAME'](https://pinboard.in/u:lUSERNAME/t:TAGNAME).
One could in principle hook items to Pinboard tags. More generally, one could use Hook to hook resources to a tag in any URL-friendly tagging software.
One could also build utilities around this. E.g., I use Pinboard in combination with LaunchBar to quickly find all tags of a given name.
Returning to your original concern about deletion, I don’t think Pinboard supports tag deletion (at least not easy ways of deleting tags).
Hook has an option to automatically bookmark in Pinboard (and/or Goodlinks, and/or Instapaper) web pages that are bookmarked by Hook.
what’s interesting there IMHO is cross-protocol linking. Pinboard is just for web stuff. Hook extends that.
We do want tags as first class data objects in Hook. And we also have some other facilities on the roadmap that provide related functionality in different ways.