iOS only?

kevin

Hey everyone!

I’m sure the subject of iOS has worn out its welcome. Especially since 1Writer was recommended as a companion to The Archive.

But what if someone was iOS only? Or iOS mostly? I bought the archive today because I really appreciate what you guys are doing.

BUT I mostly use iOS and try to avoid systems that require me to open my Mac to maintain.

Any recommendations? Is 1Writer still the right idea?

Bear, Ulysses, Drafts 5 and DEVONthink are all on my devices and available.

Thanks!

tf2

I do use my Mac (a lot), but I also create and use notes on my iPhone quite a bit. I use Drafts, and I have custom actions that use the first line of a note as a title (and add a date time stamp), and the second line as tags (I separate the tag values with commas).

Although I create my notes in Drafts, I tend to search and use them in 1Writer -- it's very fast, renders markdown nicely, and I just recently discovered that it, in preview mode, it also turns #hashtags into clickable links that will search for that hashtag.

davidrcalvert

tf2

Could you share those actions you have for drafts and 1writer? Would appreciate that.
David

tf2

I'm pretty sure I don't use any specific actions for 1Writer, since I primarily use it for viewing and searching my notes. It's easily the best app I've found for that, in part because it handles Dropbox photos and renders Multimarkdown very nicely (for my purposes).

The Drafts actions are pretty simple. I use an overly complex file-naming convention, that I'm in the process of dropping, so I have several actions, but they all boil down to the same two steps. (The example below is from my action to save a note that qualifies as a "running list", which might explain some of the details.)

1. A script step that processes the first line by replacing spaces with hyphens (I have an aversion to spaces in filenames, and hyphens don't seem to get in the way of searching on iOS or MacOS) and then also splits any comma-separated text in the second line into a string of tags. You might be willing to keep the spaces

   I still include my tags in two different formats in the note body text I save -- one is the standard #hashtags that The Archive and 1Writer recognize, and the other is an "xtags" system I used earlier (just prepending every tag with the letter "x" to make it more searchable). You'd probably just want to use one.

   I'll paste the script at the end.

2. The second action simply uses the processed lines from the script step to help save the file to my notes folder in Dropbox, including the body text, two types of tags (including a hard-coded tag to indicate it was created with Drafts), and a human-readable datetime-stamp at the bottom. Here's roughly what each of the fields in the Dropbox action look like:

Name: [[title_prox]]+[[modified|%Y%m%d%H%M%S]]
Path: /path/to/notes/folder/
Template:

[[line|3..]]

tags: xdrafts,[[tags_prox]]
#running_list [[hash_tags]]

added+[modified|%Y-%m-%d-%H%M%S]]

Here's the Script action -- I should say I almost certainly adapted this from someone else's work, because I know almost no JavaScript:

var lines = draft.content.split('\n');
if(lines && lines.length) {
     title = lines[0];
     var titlewords = title.split(' ');
     tagstring = lines[1];
     var tags = tagstring.split(',');
     var othertags = tagstring.split(',');
     var arrlen = tags.length;
     for (var i = 0; i<arrlen; i++ ) {
          tags[i] = "x"+tags[i];
          othertags[i] = "#"+othertags[i];
     }
     newtags = tags.join(',');
     hashtags = othertags.join(" ");
     newtitle = titlewords.join('-');
     draft.setTemplateTag('tags_prox',newtags);
draft.setTemplateTag('title_prox',newtitle);
draft.setTemplateTag('hash_tags',hashtags);
}
else {
     stopAction();
}