Imagine that you’re working on a document on your Mac. At some point, you’ll need to take a look at those emails about the project, or check that photo you snapped of the whiteboard. Maybe you have them all open already, in your perfectly organized workspace. But what about when you come back to that document tomorrow, or next month?
What if you could tap a key, and a panel would pop up, with all those linked documents listed? You could just click on one to open it. That’s what you get with Hook, a new Mac app that links documents together so you never need to go searching for them again.
Hook lets you link any documents on your Mac to any other documents. And by documents, I mean emails, web pages, mind maps, notes, Pages and other kinds of documents. Pretty much anything. You can even link to individual how-to tasks in Things and OmniFocus.
Photo: Hook
There are two ways to link documents using Hook. One is to use a keyboard shortcut to pop up the Hook panel, and hit a button. This will copy a link to whatever you’re viewing at that moment. Then switch to another app or document, trigger the panel, and “paste” the link. Those two documents are now linked.
The other way is to drag the document (using its title-bar icon, for instance) onto the Hook menubar icon. Anything you drag up there is automatically linked.
Then, whenever you’re working on a document, you can invoke the Hook panel, and see a list of linked documents. Just click one, or use the arrow keys, and you can open it right up.
Photo: Hook
This is such a fantastic, simple idea that it seems like it should be built into every computer.
You can even share hook:// links. If you keep all your related documents in shared Dropbox folders, on on iCloud, those links will work for other people who have access to the same files. And the Hook links aren’t only accessible from the Hook panel. You can copy one as a Markdown link, and paste it into any text field. Your report could have footnotes that link directly to source documents, for example. Or you could drop the links into calendar notifications.
Even if you’re not getting fancy, just having a way to link arbitrary documents together, without having to manage and worry about tags and other nonsense, is great I’m gonna check out the free Hook trial right now
Price: $15/$20 with free trial
Download: Hook
