Weak Ubiquitous Linking in Apple’s Apps
If you are like many knowledge workers, on a typical day you access over dozens of information resources. If you have to use search or navigate through folders to get to them, you’re taking a big hit on productivity. It’s much easier to access a resource by clicking on a contextually placed link than it is to search for it or navigate to it through folders. For instance, if your task list contains links to the resources (drafts, emails, notes, PDFs, etc.) you need to process today, then you can use your task list becomes a hub from which you can quickly jump to what you need.
Luc Beaudoin (Mac Power Users):
Despite its polish and promise, macOS still lacks overt support for robust, user-friendly linking. This violates both the spirit and the practical recommendations of the Manifesto for Ubiquitous Linking, which I authored to encourage software platforms and developers to address what I call the meta-access problem: the difficulty of re-accessing information that is related to your contextual focus.
[…]
Take Apple’s own macOS apps. In Notes, Messages, Reminders, Freeform, and even Mail, there is no “Copy Link” menu option that would let users create a persistent, shareable link to a specific item. This is a fundamental limitation for anyone who wants to organize information across documents and applications. In many cases, there’s no straightforward way — via the UI or automation — to get reliable, cross-device links.
Even when underlying identifiers do exist — and clearly they must — Apple keeps them hidden. For example, when you receive a date in a text via Messages on macOS, you can click it to create a Calendar event. That event includes a hidden link back to the original message, something like:
sms://open?message-guid=ABCBB940-08A7-4FC8-8FDF-DF32CEB4234EBut this linking mechanism is entirely private. There is no public API or automation hook to retrieve message GUIDs. So while Apple engineers can build this feature into Calendar, third-party developers and users are locked out.[…]
There’s no AppleScript or Shortcuts action to [copy Music or Podcast links] either. One couldn’t add more hurdles to linking if one tried. And without a Copy Link menu item in the app’s menu bar, even UI scripting is impossible.
Previously:
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Mailtags had the functionality to get a link to an email. After Mailtags became obsolete I had to replace that with an AppleScript. I agree that linking should be possible.
It would be so much easier to collaborate using shared iCloud Drive folders if you could just send someone a link to a specific file or folder inside it. The same goes for Apple Notes and other apps.
We constantly run into questions like these:
- “Where's that document you were talking about?”
- “Where’s the note I need to add my meeting minutes to?”
- “Our calendar is showing two of the same event on my side, but your app only shows one. Which one should I keep?”
Being able to send a direct link to any of those things would be a huge help.
> If you are like many knowledge workers, on a typical day you access over dozens of information resources. If you have to use search or navigate through folders to get to them, you’re taking a big hit on productivity.
I'm probably a weird knowledge worker, but I typically leave all the resources I need open all the time in browser- or app windows, maybe spread across different Desktops and access them spatially via Mission Control or Command-Tab.
But the ability to create a "persistent, shareable link to a specific item" would definitely improve things in a collaborative scenario.
