For years, people (*cough* Jeff Gross *cough*) have been nagging me to use Evernote, but I’ve always put it off because I really needed a note-taking app that integrated well with todos. Lately, I’ve been spoiled by the ThinkBook iPad app, which makes it easy to create todo items without leaving the context of the note you are working on.
And while there are rumors of an upcoming Evernote To-Do app, if I was really going to take the plunge and join the Evernote cult, I didn’t want to wait for an integrated todo solution. The first crack in my resistance came from Jeff getting me into the private beta for zendone, a fantastic web app that implements GTD task management and integrates with Evernote: every note in your default notebook shows up in the zendone inbox so you can turn any of them into todos, todos created from Evernote items display the note as an attachment, and all your non-actionable items can be stored within Evernote.
Even better, you can create todos directly from within Evernote by using a simple syntax in the title of the note, like: “- hire an MBA intern. next.” (this creates a starred to-do titled “hire an MBA intern” that shows up in the next actions list in zendone). While this is great, it still requires you to leave the context of the current note you are writing in order to create a new note for the todo. This annoyed me until I stumbled upon this post from Mark Whitcher about how to create a new Evernote note from selected text using Automator and AppleScript on MacOSX.
With a few minor changes to Mark’s script, I can now quickly create new todos without leaving the note I’m working in:
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Here’s the applescript for anyone who’s interested:
on run {input, parameters}
set dialog_box to (display dialog ¬
"Note title:" default answer ¬
"-" & input buttons {"Cancel", "Save"} ¬
default button 2)
set button_clicked to button returned of dialog_box
set note_title to text returned of dialog_box
if button_clicked = "Save" then tell application "Evernote"
tell notebook "Default Notebook"
set new_note to create note with text input as string set title of new_note to note_title
end tell end tell end if end run
