Are you a Mac user? Are you a knowledge worker? Then I have something for you. Hooked is a new clever helper that offers a completely new way to link information.
The daily routine of a knowledge worker on a Mac: I have a dozen different programs open, containing various types of information. I research in the browser, communicate with other people via email. The coordinates of those people are in the address book and their appointments in the calendar. I compile my knowledge in a text document, edit images in a graphics tool, and then store them in an image management system.
Until now, the big bracket around all this information on the Mac was the file system, i.e., the Finder. Some information can already be linked together, for example, I can copy a web URL and paste it into a word processor. But how can I link an email from a specific contact with the corresponding address of the contact in a text document? It’s not possible. Or rather, it wasn’t possible.
From today, it is. With a small tool called Hook. It’s currently only available in a public beta, so it’s free for now. Hook runs in the background, displaying itself in the Mac’s menu bar if desired. Hook is a kind of meta-layer to the Finder. The app maintains a database in the background where links to various pieces of information are stored. This is all a bit abstract and difficult to describe, but I’ll try to clarify with an example.
In the Publishing blog, I read the article about the Duden Mentor. This is convenient because I’m currently working on a blog post where I want to introduce various tools for improving language. This text is being written in TextEdit. The article in the Publishing blog was written by Simea Ulrich. She is a contact in my address book, and I’m contacting her via email. Now I can link all this information and action steps with the corresponding artifacts (documents, emails, URLs, etc.) using Hook. For example, if I then call up Simea in the address book and open the Hook window, I see all these connections. When I’m working on the text, I can open Hook, and there I also see all the connections and can, of course, jump directly to the targets. Naturally, I can create as many links as I want and can also export them as a list. Or even more cleverly: I can define a document, e.g., a mind map, as the default target. Then all links are not only stored in Hook but also immediately entered into a mind map.
