Wait, has the Workflow app been changed to Shortcuts, not replaced? I mean, is the Workflow app on my phone actually the same app as what will be Shortcuts is I update to iOS 12?
I’m confused.
Wait, has the Workflow app been changed to Shortcuts, not replaced? I mean, is the Workflow app on my phone actually the same app as what will be Shortcuts is I update to iOS 12?
I’m confused.
🔖 Read: How to Trigger IFTTT Applets with iOS 12’s New Shortcuts App and Siri – MacStories
🔖 Read: Siri Shortcuts: Opening up Siri’s next chapter | Macworld
🎧 Listened to: Cortex #33: Cortek
I’ve been taken a lot of notes lately, for my masters studies. I take notes in class and, most importantly, I highlight passages in the books I read and also take notes around the reading. Some of those notes relates directly to the highlighted passages, other notes are more general thoughts as I’m trying to work things out.
As I was reading, highlighting and writing last week I realised that over the course of two years these notes and highlights would grow to a big mess of assorted thoughts that I could never have any hope of organising in my final thesis, or any written exams either for that matter. So I need a better system.
I recalled having heard one or more podcasts where CGP Grey talked about how he handled similar tasks around his research for videos so I googled and found this old episode of Cortex. Around the 44:00 marker he describes his main workflow. Here’s the gist of it
Read ebooks -> Highlight passages -> When done, screen shot the pages with highlights -> import screenshots into Evernote -> Make notes in Evernote
I need to do something similar, but two things
Grey (and Myke) was already upset with Evernote when makes this podcast (in July 2016) and in later episodes that has been mentioned again and again, so it seems like it would be dumb to actually start taking these kind of notes in Evernote today.
So basically what I need is
I’m thinking of maybe some kind of combination of Microsoft OfficeLens for the scan and Apple Notes for everything else, or maybe just Microsoft OneNote for the whole thing. Or maybe save the notes as flat text files (preferably in Dropbox or iCloud Drive) together with PDF scans from something like OfficeLens. In this later case I might not need the OCR on the phone since instead I can use PDFPen on my Mac.
What do you think? Any suggestions?
@MrHenko I cannot be certain, but I seem to recall the Dropbox will ocr a pdf for you. And there are any number of iPhone apps that will create a pdf from a page. I use Tinyscan. For the notes, I would use plaintext and some kind of Zettelkasten. Their app The Archive is good.
@MrHenko I use Scanbot (iOS) to capture any snippets from books I want to remember, use the results from Scanbot’s OCR to import into Day One where I’m able to add tags and context (date, location, the image itself, etc.). Pretty easy workflow, and ends up being a beautiful digital commonplace journal.
@vasta That’s an interesting approach. What happens when you decide to stop subscribing to Day One?
@jeremycherfas Thanks, I’ll look into Zettelkasten and The Archive app.
I did a quick googling about the Drobox ocr and it seems to be a Dropbox Business only feature and as of right now I’m not a Business customer.
@vasta Thanks, I’ll look into Scanbot!
@MrHenko Sorry if I misled you on Dropbox. It was just a vague memory. I’ll be interested to watch how your note-taking develops.
@jeremycherfas Oh, no need to be sorry. I don’t see that as misleading me in anyway. I appreciate all suggestions.
Glad to hear that you’re keen on my results. I’ll keep you – and the rest of the web – up to date.
@jeremycherfas Also, you are very quick with your replies today. Are you procrastinating actual work as hard as I am? :)
@jeremycherfas That’s a really good question, one I haven’t consciously thought about enough. Right now, I back up my Day One entries in various places, but I think I should probably do better at ensuring the longevity of the commonplace archive. Thanks for the prod to do that!
@MrHenko I certainly was this morning. Enjoying a bit of free time in the city, and so doing what everyone on public transport does and reading my phone.
@vasta I know that when I exported my entries from Day One Classic I was very disappointed by the attached photographs and how they were “attached”.
@vasta @jeremycherfas I have been burnt once when I lost the Day One extries. Since then, I have made it a point that everything I write exists as plain files first (mostly markdown) at multiple places.
@amit I’m the same. But although I have searched, I have not yet found an open-source solution — that is one where I can keep a hold of my data — that is either as easy to use or as pretty to look at as Day One.
@amit @jeremycherfas Thank you for the words of caution. I shall spend some time this weekend exploring my options.
@vasta That sounds pretty great. 📚
🎧 Listened to: Episode 21 – Banning Mobile Phones in School – Fragmentum
This is some interesting food for thought for me, because I do think that banning phones in the classroom of kids can be a totally reasonable thing to do.
Thanks for your perspective Adam!
🎧 Listened to: Micro Monday – Micro Monday Extra: Late Night In The Airstream with @aaronpk at XOXO
Aaron brings up some interesting points and I wholeheartedly agree with him that the most important thing about the indieweb and owning your content is to own your domain name.
My personal site (where you might read this) has lived on at least three different web hosts but the domain has always been mine. In my particular case there are probably some broken permalinks in old posts that I will need to fix some day but most things are easily findable on the site.
It’s also nice that Aaron points out that the indieweb is not like the web of yore, it is so much more with webmentions and similar tools.
🎧 Listened to: Episode 22: On the Road Again – Percolator
🎧 Listened to: This Week in the IndieWeb Audio Edition • September 1st – 7th, 2018
🎧 Listened to: H.I. #59: Consumed by Donkey Kong — Hello Internet
Brady and Grey discusses follow up from their previous discussion on Guns, Germs and Steel and while the discussion itself is interesting, I think the main point can be found around the 39:50 mark.
If you here about a persons opinion and arguments and want to argue against them, make sure to go back to the source and check that the person actually thinks and argues what you’ve been told he/she is arguing. Don’t argue against someone else’s straw man of a person.
Before I started to logg my podcast listening on my blog my ”system” for keeping track of important episodes and their content was to screen shot Overcast whenever I listened to something particularly interesting. I will use some of those screenshots to back-fill some data.
Replies and comments
hutaffe
25 september, 2018 11:19@MrHenko I think it’s the same and just got rebranded. If you searched for shortcuts in Spotlight, the search result was still named Workflow, although this has changed now 😉
MrHenko
25 september, 2018 11:30@hutaffe Seems something like that, yes.
I just tried to download Workflow to my iPad, where I haven’t had it before. A search for it just showed me the Shortcuts app. Since nothing about Shortcuts on the App Store told me that it in fact was Workflow, instead I tried to find the app store link from my phone where I do have Workflow installed. When I searched my list of installed apps via the App Store app I found Shortcuts instead of Workflow. Really confusing!
So I installed Shortcuts on the iPad, got an error message telling me that the latest version isn’t compatible with my OS (iOS 11) and asked me if I wanted to install an older version. I said yes and got Workflow installed.
If this had happened on Android it would be the kind of thing that Apple nerds (myself included) would complain about as ”typical Android”. ”This poor user experience is why iOS is superior”, etc.
hutaffe
25 september, 2018 11:33@MrHenko yeah… I don’t know why they didn’t just really replace it. Would have been much better understandable. I searched for the Shortcuts app and didn’t find it. Instead it showed up in the Updates section, but I never installed it… I had Workflow… confusing.
MrHenko
25 september, 2018 14:24@hutaffe Either that or kept the Workflow name. Doing that would also avoid the problem that seems to be present now when there are shortcuts (lowecase s) and there are Shortcuts (uppercase s), or possibly Shortcuts shortcuts.
Avancee
25 september, 2018 20:12@MrHenko it’s mostly the same; but there are a few differences in some of the integrations and the Siri activation. For my iPad, restarting after the update showed the update to Shortcuts and things changed from there. However, the system name is still Workflow in several areas, and also when connecting/reconnecting to apps like Evernote
MrHenko
26 september, 2018 08:37@Avancee It’s a good thing that Workflow is/was something that mainly ”power users” used. This transition seems like somtehing that would confuse the hell out of a regular non-technincal user.
Avancee
27 september, 2018 00:30@MrHenko Indeed. For as much as people have love to see the workflows that I’ve created; they are just a little bit further out there that many people want to travel. That said, it’s a very similar reaction to when people used to talk about macros in Excel. Which means the learning curve, and the potential to do a whole lot more, is open for as many developers and power users who want to explore