I use Things for my task manager. Am switching to Agenda for my project management and project notes. Things has a great feature called “Quick Entry with Autofill” which can automatically populate a Things task with selected content and even links from where one is clipping. On the web it will bring in the URL and any selected text, for instance. When clipping from other apps, such as DEVONthink, it will also bring in the special URL identifier for that DEVONthink document. It doesn’t do this for Agenda though. I’m not sure which developer has to do something to make this work, or both, but it would be a great way to quickly create tasks in Things from Agenda, with selected content and the link back to the exact Agenda note. Please look into it. Thank you.
If I understand correctly, you are talking about web clipping, is that right? If so, it’s certainly a feature we plan to support. It would be very useful.
Thanks for the feedback!
No, that’s not what he means(although web clipper would be great to have). He means that there’s a thing called “things helper” which lets you add x-callback urls automatically depending on the app that’s active by pressing ctrl+alt+space(for example, it copies the mail link so you can open that exact mail connected to a task you create right from things3).
Here’s a link to the explanation from cultured code: Things Helper - Cultured Code
I’m not sure if it’s agenda’s team or things’ team that have to work on this for it to start grabbing urls.
Drew, “hickz” is correct. It is not a web clipper I am talking about. Let me try to explain better…
What I am talking about is clipping from Agenda into Things. As “hickz” says, I would like the x-callback url of the Agenda note to be clipped into Things. Let me show you a screenshot to explain and show what would be ideal. This is a shot of what gets clipped into Things from DEVONthink, when you have selected text in DEVONthink and you use the Things Quick Entry with Autofill:
Things automatically grabs the x-callback url of the specific file in DEVONthink when clipped. And the file name.
What would be ideal in Agenda is for Agenda to autopopulate the task name in Things with whatever text is selected, and include the x-callback url Agenda link for that note in the notes field.
There is a lot of talk on these forums about integrating Agenda with Things, and if you could create Things tasks by just selecting text in Agenda, hitting the Things keyboard shortcut, and getting a task autofilled with the text from Agenda and a link back to the note, it would be fantastic. I use DEVONthink with Things this way all the time.
Now, is it something the maker of Things (Cultured Code) needs to add, or is it something that Agenda needs to do to make this work, I don’t know. But, if implemented properly it would go a long way to making the two work together seamlessly without either app changing anything about what makes each great.
If you need more clarification let me know. This is very important to me. Thanks.
Let me also add the following… here is a link to the page on Cultured Code’s site explaining this:
https://culturedcode.com/things/support/articles/2249437/
Also, there is a little “footnote” text on that page when talking about integration with other apps that says the following about which apps will work with it:
The app needs to have an AppleScript interface so that Autofill can access a selection within it. Specifically, the developer needs to support linking to objects in the app via URLs: for example, Mail uses message:// and Safari uses http:// or https://.
So, hopefully that helps. Hope you can get it working.
Thanks! That is a good start, but it is still a bit obscure. Will see what I can find out. (I have met those guys a few times…)
Thanks. Hope you can get it working.
Have emailed them. Will see what they say.
I agree, this will indeed be a great addition to Agenda.
Yes, great feature indeed, although not many apps support that, apart from Web browsers and Finder. I would love it if Bear would include that too. Agenda, Things, Bear: great trio
Any update on this?
Haven’t had time to fully investigate. Things got in contact, and it seems we need to add a small amount of AppleScript support. Will try to get to it in coming weeks.
Excellent. I look forward to it.
For Things users it will make for a seamless integration between the two apps. I am using Agenda for managing project notes, and Things for tasks. With links between the two apps for quickly jumping back and forth. If you can implement full Things Quick Entry support then it will make the process much faster.
Just to let you know, I have completed the work in Agenda now. It should be out with Agenda 19, which is not too far off.
After we release it, Things need to update their Things Helper app to support it. I am in contact with them, and hopefully this can be done reasonably quickly.
In any case, I’m onto it.
Excellent. Once fully implemented, some of us will find this extremely useful, and will be something you can point users to who want a better integration between the two apps.
Just to come back to this: I added what Things needs for the integration in Agenda 18.3.1, which is now available.
The Things team were very helpful, and have tested it, and said they will add Agenda in an upcoming release of Things. So should not be long now.
Great. Thanks, I look forward to it.