A great day for iOS apps. Drafts 5 is out, & Things 3.5 gets some refinements & enhancements (especially for automation geeks). → Things 3.5 Brings UI Refinements, Tagging and Automation Improvements, Clipboard Integration Source

@40Tech I think the new Things3.5 is enough to spur me to finally learn to use Workflow.

@ronguest Workflow is great. I've wanted to be in my recliner with my office phone headset, & have my iPad trigger my phone across the room. Accomplished this yesterday with Worfklow sending the clipboard with a phone # via Dropbox to Keyboard Maestro, which dials my phone.

@40Tech I just sidetracked myself into Workflow and found one that will very helpful in my (experimental) move away from Evernote and to Notes. I think I’ll need to create a KM macro to do the same on my Mac.

@ronguest I want to move away from Evernote, but to DEVONthink. The only problem is Evernote has really nice webclippers... so you just write notes in Evernote? That’s why you’re using Drafts as an input method?

@vishae I don’t use Drafts at all. I used to use the web clipper in Evernote heavily and agree it is pretty darn nice, as is annotating in Evernote after clipping. But I’m trying out using Workflow to clip info into Notes directly.

@vishae You can clip into DEVONthink as a web archive, on both Mac and iOS. The Mac supports other formats, too, like PDF. I also have a Workflow on iOS that converts a page to PDF, and sends the PDF to a Dropbox folder that DEVONthink on the Mac automatically imports.

@vishae Started out clipping text but the pages I clip usually have graphs or images that don’t get imported. So now I use PDF which also allows annotation. In the WF gallery I just took the “Make PDF” example and replaced the Quick View action with the Create Note action.

@vishae To be clear the WF approach is not as powerful as Evernote. For a really heavy web clipper I would not recommend moving to Notes. I only clip one or two things a day.

@40Tech @ronguest I had looked at “make pdf” on Workflow, but it doesn’t take images or other elements on the page into account when it makes page breaks. The image just gets sliced in half. I can’t remember how Evernote handles that.

I’ve seen the web archive option on DEVONthink before but wasn’t too sure about it. Does it save images locally? Is this a file format that is likely to last? I don’t want a library of web archives that I can’t read years down the track.

@vishae That's a good question. I've never called up a web archive that didn't work, but don't know if that's just luck. You can let iOS generate the PDF natively via the Print menu, using the finger spread trick, and share that to DT. In limited testing that didn't split images.

@40Tech what’s the finger spread trick? (Lol, that sounds a lot worse when written out...)

@vishae Two fingers moved apart. It ‘enlarges’ the preview to full screen.

@vishae Check out this link. On an iPad without 3D touch, in step 3 you'd put your fingers on the preview in a closed pinch gesture and spread them apart. That will turn the document into a PDF.

@40Tech @ronguest Holy crap, I did not know you can print to PDF on iOS.

The resulting PDF is much better than the “make PDF” version on Workflow or the “Create PDF” on iOS share sheet.

Now I just need to tweak my workflows...