Reprinted from TidBITS by permission; reuse governed by Creative Commons
license BY-NC-ND 3.0. TidBITS has offered years of thoughtful commentary
on Apple and Internet topics. For free email subscriptions and access to the
entire TidBITS archive, visit http://www.tidbits.com/


               VidBITS: A Hookmark Walkthrough with Luc Beaudoin

   Adam Engst

   To quote hypertext pioneer Ted Nelson, 'Everything is intertwingled.'
   We've internalized that idea on the Web, where we constantly navigate
   links between pages, sites, and resources. But what about on our Macs?
   Linking between a PDF, an email message, an OmniFocus task, and a
   research document? That's surprisingly difficult'unless you have the
   right tool.

   Enter [1]Hookmark, a Mac utility from CogSci Apps that brings the power
   of hyperlinking to your local files and apps. With Hookmark, you can
   copy a link to almost anything'a file, an email message, a specific
   location within a PDF'and paste it wherever you need it. Better yet,
   you can create bidirectional 'hooks' between related items, so you can
   navigate from your notes to the source PDF and back again.

   I've known about Hookmark for years, but never quite wrapped my head
   around how I'd use it. So I did something new: I asked CogSci Apps
   founder Luc Beaudoin to walk me through a live demo, rebooting
   TidBITS's VidBITS column in the process (see '[2]LittleBITS: Rebooting
   Our VidBITS Column,' 18 February 2026, for more about this experiment).
   The result is an [3]hour-long video, where Luc shows me Hookmark's
   capabilities in action'from copying links and hooking items together to
   deep linking into PDFs and using Hookmark's bookmark window as a
   dashboard for quickly accessing working documents.

   IFRAME: [4]https://www.youtube.com/embed/H129o8BFd18?feature=oembed

   If you're a researcher building a knowledge base, a lawyer managing
   case files, or anyone who needs to navigate quickly between information
   scattered across multiple apps, Hookmark may be exactly what you've
   been looking for.

   That said, after talking with Luc and seeing him demo Hookmark, I've
   realized why it took me so long to understand it and why it doesn't
   hold much appeal for me. It seldom takes more than a day or two to
   write a TidBITS or TidBITS Content Network article, and although I
   usually open and refer to multiple tabs in Arc while writing, I close
   them as soon as I'm finished and never need them again. I don't have
   research or writing projects that are sufficiently long-term to benefit
   from collecting and linking documents. But that's just me!

   Hookmark offers a [5]free 30-day trial. If you want to continue using
   it after that, the Standard version costs $29.99 and the Pro version
   $69.99, both with 1 year of updates. The [6]pricing page compares the
   two versions, though you'll likely know which one makes sense for you
   only after using the trial. Hookmark is also available through
   [7]Setapp. There's also a free Basic version that lets you use Hookmark
   to copy links to email and Web pages, plus open and navigate links
   you've previously created or that others have shared with you.

References

   1. https://hookproductivity.com/
   2. https://tidbits.com/?p=73306
   3. https://youtu.be/H129o8BFd18
   4. https://www.youtube.com/embed/H129o8BFd18?feature=oembed
   5. https://hookproductivity.com/download/
   6. https://hookproductivity.com/buy/
   7. https://setapp.com/apps/hookmark

.