I keep flipping back and forth between Agenda and Notes.app

[joel.esler]

Long time user of Evernote here, so I start this with that in mind.

I moved from Evernote to Notes.app awhile back, and then have flipped back and forth between Notes and Agenda several times. I WANT to use Agenda, because I love the reminders integration and the calendars integration, this is super killer. But, I don’t WANT to user Reminders, I want to use Omnifocus. Hence my request in other places to please figure out a magical way to support Omnifocus for tasks.

The other reason I keep flopping back and forth is because Notes supports attachments better. Not as good as Evernote, but better than Agenda. Yes, I can attach a word doc, or a PDF to a note in Agenda, but it renders it as an icon. I want a preview of the doc (or ppt) and be able to flip through it (like Evernote), or a PDF, and be able to page through it. Also indexing of all of those things. Notes does this, again, not as good as Evernote, but better than Agenda.

To be clear, I LOVE agenda, and I want to move to it, but it does just enough things this much not enough for me. Maybe it’s just me.

[drewmccormack]

Thanks for the feedback!

@joel.esler

Yes, I can attach a word doc, or a PDF to a note in Agenda, but it renders it as an icon. I want a preview of the doc (or ppt) and be able to flip through it (like Evernote), or a PDF, and be able to page through it

We don’t render a preview, mainly because at small sizes, it isn’t that useful. But we do allow you to look into the document via QuickLook. That allows full previewing of PDFs and other documents.

Agenda 14, which is coming soon, will offer more functionality with attachments too. Stay tuned for that!

@joel.esler

I want to use Omnifocus

This is a bit tricky, because there is a lot of overlap. Agenda also has tasks, though not as focused as Omnifocus. If we integrate with Omnifocus, we would also have to integrate with Things etc, and a lot of the functionality overlaps. (I believe Things users may be better off, because they can work with Agenda via the Reminders app, which is exactly why we integrate with the system Reminders store — to also work with other apps.)

I guess Omnifocus is not integrating with the Reminders app. Perhaps there is a way to do that via a 3rd party tool.

Can you be a bit more specific about the integration you are after? Eg syncing all Agenda checklists to Omnifocus is very unlikely to happen, but if you just want a command to send a single item to Omnifocus, like we do for Reminders, that might be doable.

[mekentosj]

Note by the way that there are also a number of topics in both the Talk and Shortcuts section of this community that discuss how to integrate Agenda and Omnifocus together, for example:

My Workflow with Agenda, DevonThink and OmniFocus

As a Pastor, I need to keep lots of information and I need to stay on top of my tasks. For years, I used evernote as a general dumping ground for thoughts, information and data. It also takes links and photos and has a rudimentary task list. Then it changed CEOs, got business centered, raised their price and got very confusing to use. So I moved to DevonThink. DevonThink is a document manager with a stellar search. I would take notes at meeting in ByWord and save the document to DevonThink…

Using iOS Shortcuts to connect Agenda and Omnifocus

Tim Stringer pointed us to an interview he recently did for his website Learn OmniFocus with Agenda user @heyscottyj who you might have already seen sharing his workflow in which he combines Agenda and Omnifocus. Scotty Jackson works in a corporate environment and has a long history with OmniFocus and GTD. In the video below you can see his impressive Siri Shortcuts in-action, a must-see if like him you are a fan of both apps (the relevant segment starts at 45:33): https://learnomnifocus.com/tu…

Omnifocus integration for tasks

it would be incredibly awesome to have the option of selecting which task management platform to use. reminders is a great app, i actually use omnifocus.

Add todos to OmniFocus

I started with this shortcut for Things and adapted it for OmniFocus: I also improved the shortcut so that it appends the links to the OmniFocus tasks to the end of the note. (It requires plain text instead of rich text now). Here is the link: I’d love to change the links behavior and would place them right in the line where the todo was before. Unfortunately it seems that Agenda doesn’t support replacing a note with a new content. Only appending or creating a new one. Maybe this can…

[joel.esler]

Just the ability to do \remind would be a good start. Take the line that I’m currently writing, make a reminder out of it, but instead of sending it to Reminders, send it to the inbox in Omnifocus. You can get a link to a task in Omnifocus to track the status with as well, once created, to be able to track completion. This can all be done via AppleScript or the objective-c libraries, and would just need to be done transparently in the background.

I’ve looked at all of the iOS shortcuts and scripts to move things from Agenda to Omnifocus that are linked in this thread as well, and they work… sometimes. Side tip: I can make shortcuts reliably crash with the Scotty Jackson scripts, so that’s not going to work.

[Dave5]

For what it’s worth, I’ve had a little script that does a bi-directional sync between reminders and todoist running for a couple of years now and works great. You could probably adapt it to work with the Omni focus api fairly easily.

[mekentosj]

@Dave5

For what it’s worth, I’ve had a little script that does a bi-directional sync between reminders and todoist running for a couple of years now and works great.

Would you be willing to share the script here or if you’ve done already somewhere point to it with a link? Thanks!

[my128k]

I used 2Do for years, precisely because it was using Apple Reminder database. It gives freedom to switch to another compatible app or back to Apple in case the product is dropped or to have different app on IOS and MacOS.

After Apple made the big “update” to Reminders I lost iCloud sync with 2Do so I turned to Fantastical which manage both reminders and calendars in sync with iCloud.

[Carl-Robinson]

Re Omnifocus. If you turn reminders capture on in OF and make sure that the same list is the default list in Reminders then when you set a reminder in an Agenda note it will drop this into the OF inbox with a link back to the originating note in Agenda. Does that help?

[Dave5]

Sure! Here you go: link

[mekentosj]

Great, thanks!

[w.bone]

i do the same and it works great

[joel.esler]

Does it work? Yes. Is it optimal? No. Why? because once the reminder is transferred to Omnifocus it’s marked as “done” in Reminders (which then indicates it’s done in Agenda). Suboptimal.

[Carl-Robinson]

That’s fair. However, once a task/reminder is in Omnifocus that will be the only place that I track its status (in my workflow) - effectively means I create a task in Agenda on the fly (with Reminders) then forget about it in Agenda b/c it’s tracked in OF (however, I have the callback so I can always see what context the action was created in). In your workflow it would seem that you also want to track an action in the note itself and have bi-directional status changes, yes?, so I can see why it’s sub-optimal.

[vincent.noel]

Regarding attachments, if rendering a file preview is too hard, just rendering an icon that shows the file type would help me a lot. Knowing if an attachment is a word doc, a PowerPoint ppt or a pdf is very useful info when you’re scanning notes from past days.

[drewmccormack]

Rendering previews may be possible at some point. Something we want to look at.

The icons we use now are not Finder icons, but they should be unique to most common file types. Eg. a PowerPoint should look like a slideshow etc. A C++ programming file should have its own icon. Let us know if you get a generic one for something that should be common.

[vincent.noel]

for instance, this is the icon I get when I attach a word docx document:

This looks totally unlike any other word processor icon throughout the system and it does not help me when I’m visually scanning my notes.

[drewmccormack]

Pretty sure that is what we use for all textual documents. In that context, it makes sense to me. The only difference with a Finder document icon is there is no box around the text, but we already have a box there, and we didn’t want to make the icons too busy, so there is no box around any of them, just the content (if that makes sense).

[vincent.noel]

I’m sorry, maybe I’m not explaining myself well. I would like to be able to identify that the document is a Word document (as opposed to eg a markdown file). It is important information, that helps me remember the context – I can remember spending 3 hours in Word 3 days ago. That information is here neither present in the icon nor in the file name. Here is how the Finder presents me with the same file as above:

How Evernote shows it:

Both make it clear that the file is a Word document. Agenda does not.
(Same thing regarding PowerPoint vs keynote files, etc)

[drewmccormack]

OK, thanks for the feedback. Will see if we can improve on that.

[vincent.noel]

Thanks for listening and thanks for Agenda. It makes a real difference in my work.