New Blog Post: Anatomy Of A Great App

Software
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So I followed up on my 2019 blog post Anatomy Of A Great iOS App yesterday with Anatomy Of a Great App.

You’ll note the (unsubtle) change in title - reflecting “the times they are a’changing”. :slight_smile:

Discussion welcome, of course.

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Quick Notes – though the target being Apple Notes is less useful to me. (I’m approximating it with automation for capture to Drafts.)

care to elaborate on this? i primarily use apple pencil for quick notes, I would assume if you are transferring your quick notes to Drafts you are mainly inputing text in yours?

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What I prototyped this week - using Keyboard Maestro - was a macro that creates a new draft:

  1. If the front app is Firefox or Safari it takes the title of the front tab and its URL and makes a Markdown link. It adds to that any selected text.
  2. Otherwise it just takes any selected text - because the source is (so far) less scrutible.

In either case you get a new draft.

This is just a prototype. I could do much more with it. For example, some other apps might be linkable in a meaningful way. Such as an OmniFocus task.

I’m open to ideas on this. I might well publish the macro.

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You might be able to get the path of the front most document, for non-browser documents, depending on the app.

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Right. That was my thinking. But, for now, I think an OmniFocus task could usefully be my next target. And, for that one, a stretch target would be a link from the task’s note to the new draft.

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And indeed I got further than I thought I might…

… If a task is selected in OmniFocus I get to create a new draft that has a link to it, including task text and task URL. Further, the note field of the task gets a URL added for the draft. Double linking FTW.

Of any interest?

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OK. I made / shared a thing - extending it to do a XQuartz Text Mode (notably x3270) screen grab.

This is intended to be heavily tailored.