Freitag, 6. April 2012

How to get a task into Omnifocus for IOS from your windows PC

Hi there!
Let's face it: i - and many other poor people - need to use a windose PC at work.
I really hate it - buts there's no way arount it.
On the other side, i somewhat startet to like Omnifocus for ios.
But how the hell shall i get my work tasks on this no-so-well-connected beast?

After some fiddling i came up with the following solution envolving these programs.
You might exchange em with your own likings ;)
  • dropbox (of course...)
  • Resoph Notes (like notatational velocity for win)
  • Notesy on ios
  • Omnifocus on ios (shure!)
  • Phrase Express (like TextExpander on the mac). Feal free to use other alternatives for snippet expansion!
How does it work now?





First, i created a snippet in Phrase Express:
[to OF {#datetime}](omnifocus:///add?name={#cursor}&note=)
will be expanded by just typing ,of in my notetaking app of choise (which is Resoph Notes).


There are two little magic things :
  1. it uses a markdown link
  2. it uses the omnifocus url scheme
This will generate a markdown formated link. If you later click this in the markdown preview of notesy, it gets imported into omnifocus and creates a new entry.

Why markdown? Because it handles the URL encoding for you ;)
If you write the omnifocus url yourself, you would have to take care of e.g. replacing spaces with %20 and other not so funny stuff.


click to enlarge!



Of course, my resoph notes writes text files to the same dropbox folder my notesy app on the iphone is synching to.

Just open the note there and see it in the markdown preview.


the note


the markdown preview


Simpy click that link and it and opens in omnifocus.


Omnifocus - it took your text for the new note..

And as a goody, i have to more snippets for you:

1) This will use the clipboard for your note. So, you can write your note, mark and cut it, hit ,cof and just have to enter the name:
[to OF {#datetime}](omnifocus:///add?name={#cursor}&note={#insertclipboard})
2) And now the cool one:
[to OF {#datetime}](omnifocus:///add?name={#input -head name -single}&note={#input -head note -single})
which will show an entry box to put your task name and then another one for your note.







Alternatives

I  first had a slightly different idea:
Write to a textfile in format
myName | myNote
myName | myNote

Then pipe the thing threw awk and let it do some magic to change every (line) entry in this file to the markdown link format
[to of](omnifocus:///add?name=myName&note=myNote
and save it to dopbox.
Import same as other version using notesy.