Sometimes I come across an app and think to myself, “Why didn’t I think of this before?” Usually these apps are simple, easy to use, and take no time to learn at all. They are ones that I use all the time to do everyday tasks.
Hopper is one of those that fits this description. It is so simple, yet can be so effective for me. It is a lightweight web application that you can use as a place to store a variety of different things.
How It Works
Basically think of Hopper as your virtual pin board, so to speak. It is a place where you can collect text, images, links, and files; basically if you can copy it, you can paste it to Hopper.
My Hopper Homepage
The way that it works is that when you copy a piece of text you then just go back to the Hopper website and press ? + v. This will then paste whatever you copied into Hopper. Along with that you will now get a link to whatever you pasted into Hopper. This link can be shared out to others if that is what you want to do. If you are using Chrome you can drag and drop things into it instead of copying and pasting. I did a wide variety of testing of images, texts, links, and files and trying to put them into Hopper. I had mixed results with this as I was able to get some things in and others were not able to open properly.
How to get things into Hopper
Everything that you put into Hopper can be searched for later use. You can use keywords, date of when you think you pasted it into Hopper, or file type to find what you are looking for.
Search
It’s Still Early
The application itself is still very much so in its early stages and this is somewhat evident as I was using the app. There were small bugs here and there and I had a hard time getting images to show up when I pasted them into Hopper.
As I started to use it, the more features I started to think about that could be useful in the app. The first thing I thought about was adding tags. It would be nice to be able to add tags and make them searchable. When I reached out to developer, he said he wasn’t necessarily a fan of tags, but was looking into possibly adding comments for the things we put into the app.
One other feature that would be nice to see would be to make it more social. Maybe integrate social networks into the app so that I can share out what I put into Hopper to others if I wanted to.
Useful
If I could sum this app up in one word, useful would be the word that comes to mind. I can think of a couple of ways to use it and I am sure others can as well. For one, I use it as a place where I just want to store important things for later. So if there is a piece of text or link that I want to remember, I just throw it up there so I can get to it later. I also use it as a means of sharing something with someone else. Since everything that I put into Hopper gets its own link, I can easily share that link with whoever I want to.
Final Thoughts
Hopper is so simple, so easy to use, and so useful, that I couldn’t help but writing about it. Sometimes we get so caught up in the “more is better” mindset that we forget that simple apps like Hopper can be so great to use. I think if the developer is able to implement something so that it makes it easier to search for things, that would be my one major feature request.
Go and check it out and let us know what you think about the app. Is there anything that you would add? Do you like it the way it is right now?