What hasn’t changed in Evernote, however, is the very feature that always helped the product stand out from its competition: Evernote has an open web API that can be used to create notes and add data to them. As Ryan recently noted on MacStories, Evernote has gone through a transition period over the past few years, which has seen the once-bloated product considerably slim down its feature set, simplify key interactions, and, most surprisingly, adopt modern features such as Siri shortcuts and its own dark mode. So when I realized that I wanted to save rich text in a note-taking app without actually launching the app itself, I was out of luck.Įnter Evernote. This limitation is common to other note-taking apps that don’t feature any kind of web-based access (see Ulysses, Bear, Agenda, and Drafts). I like Keep It – it’s the most iOS-like reference manager currently on the market – but I’ve long wished it could create notes and reliably append data to existing notes without having to use x-callback-url. Keep It is part of the problem due to its limited adoption of Siri shortcuts in iOS 12 (even after version 1.6 – see footnote above). The way I see it, URL schemes are well past their prime: they kind of made sense years ago when iOS lacked any effective means to exchange data between apps, but now between Shortcuts’ support for web APIs and Siri shortcuts based on the system clipboard, URL schemes feel like a legacy, primitive technology. I prefer actions that run inside the extension and don’t force me to dance around multiple apps. I use the Shortcuts extension a lot and, whenever possible, I prefer using actions that complete a task without leaving the extension, the share sheet, and the app I’m currently using.
That was the beginning of a note-taking vision quest that culminated in this column, even though I’m not sure I reached the destination I was originally seeking.įirst, let me start from the problem. But then I remembered that Keep It’s integration with Shortcuts was limited to URL schemes and that the app did not offer Siri shortcuts to append content to existing notes 1. Simple enough, right? Given a text selection in Safari, I wanted to see if I could create a shortcut to append rich text to an existing document in Keep It without launching the app.Īs Club MacStories members know, Keep It is the app I’ve been using for the past several months to hold my research material, which played an essential role in the making of my iOS 12 review (see Issues 135 and 144) of MacStories Weekly).
A few weeks ago, I had the idea of adapting my shortcut to save webpage selections from Safari (see Weekly 151, 152, and 153) to make it work with Keep It rather than a JSON file. Like the best origin stories, this article comes from humble beginnings.