Feedback coming from Things

Feedback
1

I am a few days into using Agenda (after attempting to grossly overextend Things 3)

Today I put i place using scheduled daily reminders to pop up and allow me to trigger the creation of new notes using Siri Shortcuts (e.g. a new daily planning mantra/planning note in this case).

Ultimately it involves generating formatted text, which has resulted in two observations:

  1. I can’t figure out how to create text that is simultaneously bold, underlined AND italic without using the on screen buttons.

Exporting text formatted that way (in markdown format) shows is as such:

___**example**___

But when i paste that same text back in to Agenda (directly or via a Shortcut), it is only bold and italic, not underlined. I can’t find any combination that works.

  1. Blank lines get ‘lost’ - i can’t figure out how to have a blank line between two paragraphs. URL encoding the whole block ends badly. Any ideas?

  2. I can’t programmatically start a note with a Heading (#) - any (first) line starting with that line is ignored. Subsequent lines are fine. I dont know if this is a shortcut (URL) thing or an Agenda thing though.

Things that would be super useful aside from those two:

  1. Pick a default “copy as” method and make it possible to have a one or two click method to do it - it’s 3 taps currently (maybe a keyboard shortcut?) and I use the one option 99.9% of the time.

  2. (Aka 1a) Use the share sheet to share links to notes, not just the note itself. Share and Copy seem to overlap a lot in ways right now, especially as the share sheet has a “copy” option - curious as to what I’m missing as what the benefit between the two is! This would open up a much easier path for Shortcut automations than my current “copy link”+“launch shortcut taking clipboard content as input” method to backlink to Agenda notes.

  3. Getting the title of an existing agenda note via URL scheme. Right now, it’s a two step process to copy a link to the agenda note then when processing it to either manually type in the title again or to go back to agenda and copy/paste it

  4. Differentiate between projects with identical titles in different categories when creating notes using the URL scheme. I planned on having an inbox for dumping ideas in each of my three (Personal, Work and Committee) Categories but I’ve been too scared to see what would happen as the URL scheme only specified a project, not category. I’d use Project IDs, but I have no idea how to get them!

I’m loving it though, hence my excess attention and enthusiasm!

/Edit

Forgot my biggest one!

  1. I don’t need a full blown web or windows version, as nice as it would be.

What would be amazing though is a way to quickly and easily dump notes from my work laptop (windows :frowning: ) - be that an app or a way to send an email and have it show up as a note.

Things 3 was amazing for my wife being able to send a simple email and it would end up on my todo list. I guess i could just try convince her to use a shared reminder list…

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3

Thanks for the feedback! Very detailed.

I think the issues you came across with text are mostly due to Agenda not being a true markdown editor, but just having markdown shortcuts. Indeed, I don’t think applying multiple styles in an import will work. We will try to think of a way around that. Might be tricky.

The disappearing blank lines is actually by design: originally we preserved everything, but we started getting a lot of complaints that Agenda was spacing paragraphs too much. It was because many editors (most?) use extra new lines to create paragraph divisions (eg Apple Notes). So we decided it was probably better to remove extra new lines. It works at least for most people, though obviously if that is your intention, it is a problem. (Perhaps putting a space on the line preserves it.)

The share suggestions are good. We want to support try share extensions, but it takes quite a lot of internal rewriting to get the data to display without having the app running. We have plans to address it.

Shortcut/URL improvements are also in the roadmap. Stay tuned!

Kind regards,
Drew

4

I can live with Bold Italic without an underline in this instance - was just more an observation if you expected it to work currently :slight_smile:

I tried but spaces get trimmed. I resolved this by changing the line spacing (I had it very tight) and it looks good as is :slight_smile:

Sending the link off and having the ability query the title will allow lots of neat automations - can then link both ways without any intervention :slight_smile:

Do you have any insight into the Copy vs Share state at the moment? I feel like I’m missing the intended uses the team had in mind.

5

I don’t think you are missing anything. There are a lot of similarities between the two. Share can be faster if both apps involved are on the same page.

You can’t use Agenda as a sharing destination yet. That is where we have to do some work.

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