Custom Actions for notes

Feedback
#1

I’d really love to see two related features:

  1. Sort actions
  2. Custom actions

1: Currently the actions (tapping on the circle left of the title) are very static and I often need to show more actions to get the desired action. For others the default order might just be perfect. It would be nice to be able to adjust the order how I need it.

2: I use GoodLinks as my Read-It-Later app and it supports creating custom Actions (opening urls with placeholders for content - see attached image). I think this would be a nice addition to Agenda as well.

image
image1125×492 68.5 KB

With 2. added sorting the actions would be even more useful.

#2

Hi Jan,

Thanks for the suggestion, problem with configuring the kind of actions in that menu is that you need a way to configure, i.e. present some UI, which add complexity etc. Not sure that is worth it at the moment, we’ll take it on board though.

Regarding the custom actions, not sure I get the full idea, could you elaborate or record a small movie on how this works exactly and what the benefit would be?

#3

Hey Alexander,

The idea is to make Agenda better and faster to integrate with other apps (using url-schemes).
The usefulness mainly depends on other apps you want to integrate with Agenda.

An idea I’d like to use is with OmniFocus:
omnifocus:///add?name=[title]&note=[url]
Here [title] would be replaced with the title of the note I share.
[url] would be the link to the Agenda note.
This would open OmniFocus and create a new todo with the title of the current note and the a link back to the note.

There are also some users who have created shortcuts to use the content of the current note. Example
Currently you have to Other Actions > Share ... > Note Text (and remember you have to select RTF as it wouldn’t parse otherwise).

With a custom action:
shortcuts=run-shorcut?name=Add%20To%20Things&input=[content-rtf]
You could Custom Actions > Add To Things

#4

Hmm, so you would want to have some kind of auto-expanding parameters specifically in URLs? This is something that kind of fits in some ideas we have in mind, but no ETA on any of that yet. Will take it into account though!

#5

Exactly. Similar to the screenshot I added above I’d imagine a list of supported tags to get information from the shared note to add to the url-scheme.

#6

Yes! It would be absolutely amazing if Agenda would include ‘drop-down options’ (or something similar), sort of like when entering args into a class within an IDE. This would work great with x-callback-urls, but may even work better with custom tags.

So, let’s say you use a “priority” or “importance” tag, we could automatically get the values presented as soon as we type the “(“ and Agenda could even close the task by adding the final “)” after the selected option. An example of this would be to say you tap “low” from the list, Agenda would already have “#priority(“ as that would trigger the options, so Agenda would add the selected option and close the tag by adding “low) ” (note the intentional space as the last character here).

I do realize that some form of enumerated values would be necessary, but I also believe that even if we had to import an Excel spreadsheet or a CSV file containing those values, the majority of the users would be tech savvy enough to easily pick up its use. It could also be integrated into a menu tab (as a premium feature of course), for example by having two columns; a column for the custom tag on the left and a comma separated list of values on the right. Sequential numbers or letters could be separated with a - to simplify entering many numbers as in the case of a percentage (complete on a project). So, one could enter “#completed” in the left column and “0-100%” on the right. This is just a quick first thought, but being how powerful Agenda already is, it could really go anywhere! It has already replaced a rather large handful of daily driver apps for me!

Update: After I saved the post I saw that the backslash I placed before the dash disappeared in my enum example. I think it would be necessary and you may too, so please just pretend there is one. Thank you. :blush::+1: