Attaching external documents

I’m sure this is already on your roadmap, but it would be very useful to be able to drag and drop images, PDF files, or indeed any other external document to Agenda. And had you thought of developing a Safari (not to mention Firefox/Chrome) clipper extension…? Or even just a sharing (service) extension? I’m currently experimenting with drag and drop, and while it kind of works in a sort of a way with text, it’s a little unpredictable. Images only appear as links for the time being (but again, I’m sure you’re already thought of this!).

By the way, this built-in support forum is a brilliant idea. Bravo!

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Note attachments are something we would like to have, yes. Can’t announce anything, but we are fully aware of the need.

The Safari clipper extension is interesting. We hadn’t thought about that. So what would you like to do with that? Just copy the link? Somehow capture the whole web page? Not quite sure what you would like to have there. Can you explain?

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I’d like that too.

Bear and Things and Omnifocus all have similar services.

I’d like to:

Select text on a web page (body of note) context menu - send to Agenda
and autocreate a note (in an inbox?) with web page title as title - selected text as Note and web page url as a link below note text.

If it can be made as a text service, so it could work with other apps too, that would be great

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Hi Drew,

Well, the best way to explain is to take the excellent example of Bear (Writer)’s Safari extension, which clips the web page or else selected text and copies it (in Markdown) to a Bear note. You’re more than half way there, at a guess. Similar extensions exist for OneNote and DEVONthink, and of course you can use sharing services to copy pages or bits thereof – or in some cases, just links – to any number of other apps (Together, Keep It, Curiota, EagleFiler, Yojimbo, DEVONthink etc. etc. etc.). But the good thing about a Safari extension is that it keeps Agenda to the forefront of your users’ minds, as it were (“top of mind” thing), and of course you can devise a suitably attractive icon.

The Bear extension is the most directly comparable; I had the strong impression you’d already been inspired by Bear (re: typography, elegant formatting tools etc.) in any case, but perhaps I’m wrong? I suspect there’s Markdown happening under the skin in Agenda, hence your copying/pasting options. If you haven’t installed Bear already, I’d strongly advise it. It might also give you some ideas about the use of tags (as would Quiver, actually) as an alternative organisational option in the left-hand navigation bar…

Keep up the good work!
Bill

We were inspired by quite a few apps. We are certainly fans of Bear.

I guess you mean the “Bear Service” right, because I see a “Send to Bear” service, but not one of the sharing extensions.

We will think more about these options. The main difficulty is that unlike the other apps, there isn’t a natural place to ‘dump’ the imported text. With Bear they make a whole new note. With OmniFocus a new item in the Inbox. But Agenda is project based, so we would have to consider where such a new note would go. But perhaps we can come up with something.

Maybe that’s something you could specify as a user preference – sort of like, which project do you want to use as your Inbox, kind of thing?

You’re right about the “Send to Bear” service, but there’s also a natty little extension you can download separately from Bear’s website – yes, you have to install it yourself, but Bear includes instructions on how to do that. In fact, they now provide multiple extensions (here http://www.bear-writer.com/faq/Extensions/Browser%20extensions/, together with more details) for Chrome, Firefox and Safari.

Cheers!
Bill

Just a link to a document - PDF, Word, Excel - would be great!

And to repeat from above - a clip to Agenda would be great - especially for those of us in research.

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The other Very Useful Feature I’d love to see would be the ability to open multiple windows (so you could keep a couple of projects open simultaneously). I’m sure you’ve already thought of that one, because I’m sure you’d all love to see it as well!

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I would like to see a means to add audio files. We students need good note taking software that allows us to take notes while we capture the audio of the lecture.

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Sounds like a great idea. We would like to add support for file attachments, which work with audio files too. Won’t be in our 1.0 release, I’m afraid, but shouldn’t be too long.

Glad to hear it’s on the radar. Easily incorporating external files would make this the goto app for me.

Another feature that would help students would be the ability to import multiple document types. Obviously one of the advantages of Agenda would be the inherent ability to track changes in documents (unless I’m misunderstanding how it works; I just downloaded it and haven’t explored it much).

Ideally I’d love to be able to import everything from Notability, which is what I currently use for notetaking, but a basic workaround would be to be able to import pdf’s (which Notability can export) and sound files.

Agenda doesn’t have any change tracking (like MS Word), but it does have a concept of time, so you could indeed have ‘versions’ of your document over time. If that’s what you mean, yes Agenda would be ideal for that.

Thanks for the feedback re: notability. Will see what we can do. Worth trying copy/paste to see if that already does an OK job. (Note that images won’t come over yet, because we don’t support them.)

Safari/Firefox Webclipper sounds great. I use this for Evernote, Instapaper and Devonthink.

I would love to have:

  • Choose between generating a PDF of the webpage or selected Text
  • Add to a project
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That is indeed what I meant about ‘versions’ of documents.

Unfortunately image/ file insertion is pretty integral, since I have a lot of images in notability documents, so I’ll be patient and hope it appears in an update soon.

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Send to Agenda from Safari would be great. Doesn’t need to be as fancy as Evernote (for me, anyway). The one for Apple Notes is actually fine. It’s able to send web links to Notes, and lets you choose what note to add to (or make a new one).

This missing feature is stopping me moving over wholly from Apple Notes at the moment.

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The inability to include attachments is what keeps me from really using Agenda, as much as I’m intrigued by it. My workflow includes a lot of responding to email, reviewing documents, research. For me, projects always involve word documents, pdfs, email communications, so the ability to attach documents and clip from the web are what really make these note programs useful to me. What Evernote lacks is the ability to integrate with your calendar. OneNote is another app where you can take notes and dump any kind of document or clip any website, but it also lacks the calendar integration Agenda has. If there was a way to integrate this you’d have the holy grail for productivity on your hands!

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We hear you, the moment the iOS version is out we will shift our full attention to inline images and attachments as our main priority…

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Check out Keep it app (formerly called Together) for that matter. When you are trying to clip a webpage the app will ask you in which category (in Agenda’s case would be Project) would you like to save that page.

Yup, this is an absolute love for me