3rd party Integration

russ · January 31, 2018, 11:39pm

Love it.

Really great start. I had no real reason to adopt Agenda, but I found better than mind maps, Evernotes bloaty uselenessness, and although maybe not intended to replace Bear, I felt the way the UI gently nudges you toward a style is great.

I see a use case for 3rd party apps like Bear and to lesser extent, Evernote.

Bear is my life repo. All notes, clippings, and just doco I’ve put together over time lives there. The Alfred workflow makes creating and searching a breeze.

I think of it like this: Bear is my somewhat structured but still uncomplicated data, like JSON, with tags providing enough metadata to be useful. Bear is my workhorse, and I can author big documents in it.

Agenda is the pretty frontend for a large but specifc use case: projects or strucutred tasks that require notes, todos, and other things.

I can’t see myself spending as much time in Agenda, authoring, but rather oganising.

Paradise would Bear, Things 3, OmniFocus, OmniPlanner, Github, Trello etc.

Having a note that was synced across both platforms as in Bear, and being able to add integration which may amoun to plugs, would be fab.

yaoyongping · February 1, 2018, 12:50am

Would like to see integration with OmniFocus too.
I’m also a Bear user. But I use it more like a note book and knowledge collector. Maybe a link scheme would be enough. Just like Agenda’s links in the calendar.

konetidy · February 1, 2018, 1:40am

Omnifocus links can be added to Agenda notes already

omnifocus:///task/dQCfUrcsIaz

yaoyongping · February 1, 2018, 2:43am

Thank you. I’m going to read the feature list now.

drewmccormack · February 1, 2018, 6:07pm

Thanks for sharing your workflow with up. Appreciate the feedback!

tqwhite · February 2, 2018, 3:18pm

Plus One on Alfred workflow. I use this extensively. I’m new to Agenda but expect it to be central. Alfred integration will encourage that.

hans · February 21, 2018, 6:11pm

I noticed that the new 3.4 version of Things does something like this. Could be inspiration for Agenda.

More info is available at: Things URL Scheme - Things Support

stephenjzeoli · February 21, 2018, 9:33pm

I came here to mention this as well. Integration with Things would really be awesome!

mekentosj · February 22, 2018, 10:08am

Agenda already has a URL scheme for displaying notes and projects, see Edit > Copy As.. > Agenda Link

trebso · February 22, 2018, 5:11pm

I have no idea how technically feasible it is, but personally if I was to use Agenda alongside a dedicated task manager, I’d really want a two way link to be created.

It would be a pain to create a new Things task from within Agenda, and then later to be in Things with that task but without a backlink.

hans · February 23, 2018, 2:26pm

Something for the future (I expect other work has priority, such as the iOS version)

I have been thinking about better integration with other applications through URLs. Many apps provide a URL interface to receive information, or commands, and to act on these. The problem is that they all use different URL schemes (I do not think that Apple has specified rules or scheme guidelines as a standard).

It is not realistic to expect from Agenda to be able to talk to all other applications.

However, there may be a solution to this: include a URL constructor in the preferences of Agenda, and use the Share menu to send URLs to other applications.

The URL constructor would provide the user with the means to construct a URL to be sent to an other application. Let me give an example to make this clearer: you want send a note as a item from Agenda to Things.

The note has a title “URL Builder in Agenda”, a content “just an idea” and a date of April 1, 2018.

From the Things scheme reference you find out that the URL has to look something like this, for Things to understand:

things:///add?title=URL%20Builder%20in%20Agenda&notes=Just%20an%20idea&when=1-4-2018

But how should Agenda know how this URL would have to look like? Answer: you (the user) tells Agenda once how this URL should be.

In preference you create a new es you create a new ‘Share to Things’ definition of the URL to be used. You construct this from a mixture of just text for the fixed parts, and variables that represent information that Agenda knows about. Example of these are a note title, the note text, the project, the date and so on. In this example. Lets represent these variable items by keyword in square brackets, like [date], or [title], or [NoteText].

In the Agenda preference you would then define this Share to Things URL definion (in plain text) as:

things:///add?title=[title]&notes=[NoteText]&when=[date]

Whet you save this definition as Share to Things, it should appear in the Share menu of Agenda.

To use this, to send a specific note from Agenda to Things, select the note in Agenda, and select Share to things from Agenda’s Share menu. Agenda then replaces the variable parts from the URL definiton (in square brackets, like [NoteText]) by the actual contents of the note (like Just%20an%20idea), and fires off this URL to be handled by Things.

This way of defining an interface in plain text is similar to defining the ‘Then’ part of an action in the if-this-then-that service on the Internet.

Of course, this can be refined further, e.g. by a standard way to obtain the scheme that an app understands, it could be shown when the user defines an URL (simlar to a dictionary in AppleScript). But this means that developers would have to agree on a standard…

I am wondering what the community members (and of course the Agenda developers) think about this idea …

drewmccormack · February 23, 2018, 7:10pm

Hi Hans,
I like the idea. Basically a URL template engine.
Would be nice if we had our own standard url integrations built in the same system, but allowed users to create their own extensions.
Will certainly keep it in mind. Sounds powerful.
Drew

trebso · February 24, 2018, 8:40am

Could be useful. Bear in mind that a Note in Agenda may have several Tasks. If I was using Things and Agenda together I’d want to use Agenda for Notes and Things for Tasks (obvs).

So I’d want to do something like:

copy the text of the current paragraph in the Note, including due date
create a Task in Things with
— the paragraph text in the title,
— the due date applied in Things,
— and a link in the Task body back to the specific paragraph in the Note.

No idea if that’s remotely plausible.

hans · February 24, 2018, 4:46pm

With the URL template builder I proposed this could be done by means of creating a URL template named “Add to Things” like:

things:///add?title=[Notetitle]&notes=[clipboardcontent]%20[linkToAgendaNote]&deadline=[duedate]

and then select the item “Add to Things” from the Share menu.

Note: this is not possible now, the URL template builder is a concept suggestion for the future of Agenda.

Of course, this specific template would only work if the template builder would support these parts:

Notetitle: title of the current note
clipboardcontent: the (textual) content of the clipboard. Better would even be a [currentselection] that represent the currently selected text of the note. This would eliminate a copy action to put the paragraph text on the clipboard
duedate: the due date
LinkToAgendaNote: the same link as you can obtain from the Edit menu in Agenda

steffen.prowe · February 25, 2018, 5:16pm

Would be great having an import-option from Evernote, so I could load-up all Evernote-files into Agenda and skip using Evernote.
The reason is, that Evernote is saving the files on an US server, I´d better like to have a back-up option on my own NAS using OwnCloud (see options coming with QNAP or Synology & OwnCloud features), and for sure having them locally on my MacBook.
The NotebooksApp is coming with this feature: http://www.notebooksapp.com after having exported from Evernote. The App itself is only a notebook, in contrast to Agenda.

mekentosj · March 20, 2018, 11:52am

Update: You’ll be pleased to know that in the 2.1 update we now support all (relevant) installed sharing extensions, making it easier to interact with 3rd party apps: