How to Automatically Transfer Evernote Notes to Omnifocus For Review
How to Automatically Transfer Evernote Notes to Omnifocus For Review.
An applescript.
Ask the nerds: NerdQuery – Brett Terpstra.
For finding very interesting posts about nerdy subjects.
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Shortly after the 24:00 mark in the latest episode of Gabe Weatherhead’s Generational podcast, Gabe’s guest, Walton Jones, starts talking about his system for annotating and summarizing academic papers. If you can listen to that 8- to 10-minute stretch without being inspired to improve your own methods for managing the flood of information in your job, then you’re dead to me.
To be sure, Walton’s system is highly tuned to the specifics of his profession. As a scientist, a good portion of his time is spent analyzing and synthesizing the research of others. That research comes to him in the form of PDFs of journal papers. He adds color-coded annotations to the PDFs as he reads them: red for summaries, green for references, yellow for results, and so on. This may sound like nothing more than a digital version of Post-it notes, but Walton has an amazing trick up his sleeve. When he’s done reading a paper, he runs an AppleScript that goes through the PDF and creates a Markdown document with all the paper’s annotations listed by page number and organized according to category (summary, reference, result, etc.). The Markdown is then turned into a new page in a VoodooPad document.
So he has this VoodooPad document with his notes on the papers he’s read, which is nice, but that’s not the end. Each individual note in VoodooPad is linked to the page of the PDF to which it refers. The power of this system is that he can search through his VoodooPad document, which has his notes and therefore uses terminology that come naturally to him while searching, and when he finds what he’s looking for, he can click a link and be taken immediately to the right spot in the right paper. This is so much better than simply searching through abstracts or lists of keywords, all of which are words chosen by others.
But don’t just go by my description, read Walton’s own explanation of his system.
While I don’t pore over research papers anymore, I do deal with a menagerie of documents—drawings, photographs, videos, test reports, deposition testimony, presentation slides, email trails—that are increasingly in some sort of electronic format. I try to organize this mess by turning everything except the photos and videos into PDFs. Like Walton, I make notes on these documents as I go through them, but I don’t do it the way he does.
My system is based on talking. Long ago, I talked into a voice recorder. Later, I started talking into my iPhone, using Griffin’s iTalk app. With both of these systems, I’d replay the recording to myself and type up the notes, usually cleaning up the sentence structure as I went along. For the past two months, though, I’ve had a much better system: Siri.
Say all the mean things you want about Siri; for me, she’s a great dictation transcriber. The individual notes I make as I read through a document are typically one or two sentences long, which is just about the perfect length for Siri. In Notesy, I tap the microphone button on the keyboard, say my one or two sentences, and tap Done. A few seconds later, the note appears. Unless I’ve hemmed and hawed or there’s a peculiar word, the transcription needs no editing and I move on.
I have a particular format I prefer, with the page number on a line of its own, then the note itself, then a blank line. A typical session would be me saying something like
Fifty-two. New line. A solid or liquid to a change in direction will be as great as a ton per square inch. Period. There are many transformations of motion. Period. New paragraph.
which comes out in Notesy as
Notesy syncs to Dropbox, so the file will be on my Mac when I’m done making notes. The format is not exactly Markdown, but it’s easy to run a global search-and-replace to add a pair of space characters after each page number to provide the line breaks I want in the output. Marked then turns the text file into a PDF.
This is a pretty good system, but what’s missing—and what Walton inspired me to add—are links from my notes to the page numbers in the original documents. Since I keep my summaries in the same directory as the original documents, the links could be added this way in Markdown:
[52](example-report.pdf#page=52)
A solid or liquid to a change in direction will be as
great as a ton per square inch. Period. There are many
transformations of motion.
I’m currently working on a script that’ll do this. It works, but it isn’t especially robust and there’s too much “by hand” work in turning the Markdown into a PDF. I’ll do a complete post when I get those problems solved.
I should mention here that neither Preview (under Lion) nor PDFpenPro handles page number links correctly. Preview opens the original document (sometimes—other times it refuses and says I don’t have permission to open it, which is probably some kind of sandboxing stupidity) but won’t go the linked page number. PDFpenPro doesn’t even get that far; it opens a blank document that it claims in the title bar is original document.
Skim, on the other hand, handles page number links like a boss. This was a little surprising to me, because Walton says in another post that it doesn’t and that he had to write a script to word around that limitation. All I can say is that Skim has worked fine in all my tests so far. I just need to get that script working so I can start using summaries with links.
via And now it’s all this http://www.leancrew.com/all-this/2012/11/notes-on-notes/
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For the uninitiated, BetterTouch Tool (BTT) is a donation-ware system enhancement application. BTT started out simply providing some additional functionality for the trackpad and mouse and has slowly grown into a serious hacker’s delight. BTT is a window manager, application launcher and much more.
Now, there is a companion iOS app, BTT Remote, that turns any iOS device into a remote control and track pad for a Mac. I took the app for a spin and it’s working very well. Check out Brett’s review for more info on what this new app can do.
Here’s a brief look at how I’ve configured the app on my iPad. I’m not using at as a remote control. I use it as a companion keyboard palette for my Mac. I generally have at least one iOS device sitting on my desk anyway. In this way, I can easily reach over and trigger a simple macro without needing to remember a keyboard shortcut or configure a new Keyboard Maestro palette.
Actions are triggered almost instantly. Occasionally there is a fraction of a second delay but in general, the actions work as if they were keyboard shortcuts.
Actions are configured on the Mac side and instantly sync to a connected iOS device. Icons are customized through drag and drop into the action on the Mac or by selecting one from the included library. I’m using some of the included icons as well as a few WooCons.
This action opens my Fluid app for Checkvist. BTT provides an action to open any application.
I created an Automator application that does one thing. It creates a new email using my Macdrifter account. BTT launches that app and a new email draft appears in front of me.
This action uses the trick I wrote about previously. It sets my audio input and output to my Rode Podcaster microphone.
The real trick here, is that BTT is actually just triggering a Keyboard Maestro macro through an AppleScript application.
From within Keyboard Maestro, I created a new group called “BTT”. This group should always be active if the macros are to be accessed by AppleScript. Each macro in the group is setup to be triggered by an AppleScript. When this setting is enabled, the macro will provide the script text to use. Just copy that out.
I have four macros:
These use the functions I have described previously.
Next, I created an Automator application that executes the AppleScript from above to run the macros. For example, this script sets the audio input and output to my Mac. Notice that it is actually running two macros.
This Automator application is called by BTT when I tap it on my iPad or iPhone. One tap and my audio input switches.
Same as above but switches my audio input and output to my Mac.
These all use the builtin window management functions of BTT to split my frontmost window across the screen or send it between displays.
These also use the built in BTT functions to control my Mac.
This action just launches the Terminal app.
In BTT, macros can be configured for a global scope or for within a specific application. I have two versions of the color picker action. One is the global color picker available in the OS and that is triggered using the default BTT action.
The second action is scoped for only within Acorn. This one triggers the Acorn color picker using menu choices. BTT can access nested menu options with a straightforward configuration.
This is the only action I would use while not sitting in front of my Mac. This is for those times when we sit down on the couch to use the AppleTV and I realize I iTunes is not running on my Mac. This macro just launches iTunes but it saves me a trip downstairs and makes everyone a bit happier.
BTT Remote is a handy little utility app. I like best for the times when I’m sitting right in front of my Mac. And if you’re a Magic Trackpad user, now you can have one the entire size of your iPad, since BTT also provides a full screen trackpad view as well. I’m not sure if I’ll stick with it, but it has some interesting options.
I’d also add, if you are a BetterTouch Tool user, buying the iOS app is a great way to support the developer.
BTT Remote | Universal | $2
via Macdrifter http://www.macdrifter.com/2012/11/bettertouch-tool-remote-tips.html