David rightly complained about linking in macOS. To quote from the YouTube transcript, he said:
1:08:20 for a couple months, the one thing that really comes up frequently, especially with power users, is linking support. I
1:08:28 mean, itās kind of crazy how hard it is to link to an Apple Note. You can do it,
1:08:34 but you got to know the tricks. And you know, this has been a common theme with all the Apple stuff. If you want a mail
1:08:42 message, you just want to get a link to it that you can embed somewhere else. Thatās hard, too. All this stuff is kind
1:08:48 of possible, but Apple obviously is not making it kind of accessible to
1:08:53 non-power users, and I feel like thatās a big thing they need to work on. And I
As the designer of a linking app ( Hookmark) I couldnāt agree more.
And Apple gives itself an unfair competitive advantage over its developers in that it fails to expose an API for linking messages that they (Apple) themselves use for integration with Calendar. If you receive an Apple Messages message containing a date, you can click on that date and create a Calendar app event for it. That Calendar event will have a deep link back to the specific location in the Messages thread. Super convenient! The problem is that thereās no API that automators like us can leverage to do that same linking, nor is there even a āget linkā UI for it. THat is to say that Apple fails to live up to the ideals of the Manifesto for Ubiquitous Linking which David, developers and I published a few years back. The manifesto explicitly aims to support the concept for which David coined the term "contextual computing..
Beeper the messaging app that integrates multiple messaging apps has recently added a command to copy a ādeepā link to a conversatio (thread). Thatās only nominally a deep link. To get to it , you do āJ in Beeeper then type ahead to the Copy chat deep link. Unfortunately, however, the link does not take you to the specific time stamp in the message. Itās not really a deep link. Itās just a link to an entire conversation. I imagine that is due to lack of APIs. So imagine you need to refer back to a conversation you had months ago with someone. That could mean a lot of scrolling! Repeat that over several conversations with multiple people (some of which might have legal value) and youāre into tedium. Computers are supposed to take away that kind of tedium.
To be fair to Apple, however, it does provide an API for linking a bunch of stuff, which Hookmark and automators can leverage. For instance, David mentioned recently that thereās a Keyboard Maestro macro to copy a link to Apple Notes (which does not have a āget linkā UI). The macro is a bit clunky, but Hookmark provides a Copy Link for Apple Notes that works on iOS too, and a Copy As Universal Link so that you can even paste that link into Notion and Google Docs which (as David mentioned in some other podcast episode) would otherwise neuter it, but Copy As Universal Link makes the link work fine in web apps. Similarly, Mail.app provides an AppleScript API that Hookmark uses enabling users to create links to emails such that they can also choose with what email app theyād like those links to open. We just need Apple to go further, resuming AppleScript work on its apps.
Iāve expanded on Appleās linking limitations over on Substack: Appleās macOS Apps Are the Weak Link - Luc Beaudoin. There I call out Apple for having a very tedious and incomplete UI for copying links to Apple Podcasts episodes and Music files (I donāt know if thatās even scriptable with Keyboard Maestro; I havenāt tried it). These links are not full links, meaning they are just a URL; the links donāt have a proper name. Thereās no AppleScript API or UI for getting links to Freeform documents. That sucks. We know under the hood Apple has indexing mechanisms. Why not expose the API and UI.
The QuickTime story is better. Automators and Hookmark app can index specific time stamps in QuickTime files. Truly deep links.
Hopefully Apple is listening to MPU and will up its linking game. If enough of us complain maybe they will get the message.
Anyone can sign the Manifesto for Ubiquitous Linking and share information about it on social media to keep the momentum going.