A new announcement from Devonthink discusses integration between DT3 and Hook:
I am scratching my head a bit - at first it sounds great but as I think about it more, I am not sure I understand what benefit this offers beyond existing Devonthink x-links.
A similar conclusion was reached in a past discussion here about Hook:
Can anyone point to some use cases where Hook adds more capability than DT3 does alone?
Also the prior discussion above pointed out that a shortcoming of Hook is that gien the absence of a method in Hook to easily list all Hook links, the value of that software overall is unclear. Thoughts?
Because if Hook does not show you a list of all of its links in an easily accessible interface, you could basically wind up forgetting what you have linked in Hook.
(1) It’s a different construct. From Hook’s perspective, DT is just one of the data sources for links. The app is about establishing links among the different documents of different apps.
(2) The two-way linkage is very interesting (hope DT will have this feature internally!) and is probably one of the missing feature in DT.
I have a document in DEVONthink “Mary’s Lamb and Her Strange Tutor”. I want to associate it with (a) a note in Notes, (b) a few websites that are related to the document, and (e) someone in my Contacts. Hook can create those associates, so that when I select the document in DEVONthink, and invoke Hook, I can see all the relationships.
Inverse case. I have a website that is related to four or five documents in DEVONthink, plus an archive file I keep on an external disk. The “mesh” of associates can easily be created with Hook.
There is NO way to simply do that (or even do it at all) with item links. So, I disagree strongly that item links are useful in the same way that Hook is.
Perhaps you might want to get Hook and see for yourself?
(Again, I have nothing to do with the owner of Hook and feel the implementation has a lot of fatal design flaws, but it is still useful.)
I did try Hook - as did some others in the thread I listed above
Those are all interesting applications, but unless there is a clear way in Devonthink to know which items are linked to others via Hook, its usefulness seems limited. Same in reverse.
Now if Devonthink showed items with a “Hook” in a different color or had some other icon to suggest there are Hooks to other software or other documents, THEN I could see a major benefit.
I’d like to automate marking a file in DT3 that has been Hooked to other files. I wouldn’t complain if a scripting guru conjured up and shared some magic, but I’m attempting to figure it out using Keyboard Maestro. Any suggestions would be appreciated.
What I’d like to do in prose form:
Add a pre-designated tag, label, custom metadata item, or appropriate annotation to a selected item in DT3 when pressing command-V while the Hook popup is active.
Since DT3 already makes it easy to see that a file has an annotation, that would be my preferred method, but I don’t know how to accomplish that. I suspect that this can be accomplished by pasting something into the item’s metadata, which if I understand it correctly, is how Hook works.
If you don’t know how to script this, use a smart-rule then. You could create one to add the tag you want (on demand) and then add the command to activate the smart-rule in Keyboard Maestro (just add an action to activate the menu item Tools>Apply rule>“smart-rule name”.
But this is actually very easy to do via Applescript.
tell application id "DNtp"
-- to start the party
set theRecords to the selection
-- save whatever we have selected in dt3 to a variable called theRecords
repeat with theRecord in theRecords
-- from this point onwards,
-- it will do everything listed below until "end repeat"
-- with each item contained in variable theRecords;
-- that is, with each item selected
set the label of theRecord to 1
-- pretty straight-forward: the labels are numbered 1 to 6
set theTags to the tags of theRecord
-- save the existing tags to a variable called theTags
set the tags of theRecord to theTags & "A million new tags" & "a million and one"
-- now we tell it to apply the tags we saved back to the record and give it a few more
end repeat
-- stop the whirlpool
end tell
-- end the party
I have explored Hook and have encountered at least one use case which is very helpful to me and cannot be done easily without Hook… Hook is able to create a link to a specific email in Office 365 email online.
However Hook is able to create the link in a simpler/quicker fashion.
I am still trying to figure out how to create the Hook link as a DT3 bookmark rather than as part of a Rich text document - see Using Hook App with Devonthink - assuming I can figure that out it may be a very nice solution. Not only would it be quicker, but I could also insert the hook link in any DT3 group desired.
