I have chosen Drafts as my note taking app primarily because of two reasons.
First, I use the hell out of the Drafts watch app. I’m a consulting engineer and as I walk through a project, I am constantly talking to my watch to document the project. This provides me with notes far superior to me stopping and hand writing in a notebook.
Second, its my understanding that Drafts uses plain text for it’s file storage. This leads me to my question. My whole business revolves around Devonthink. My goal is index my Drafts Notes folder.
This way, 100% of my business info would be searchable in DT.
So my question is, does anyone here know where/how are the Drafts notes stored?
Drafts doesn’t store plain text files you could index; they’re in iCloud (CloudKit) sync.
I definitely like the idea. I use a push to DEVONthink action for Drafts I want to save, but then I delete the Drafts note, and it sounds like you want to refer to your existing notes within Drafts.
Same here, with the one distinction that I am not an engineer.
Like @cornchip said, it is not possible to index Drafts files. Because the notes are not single files but entries in a locked database. Which to me, as I have mentioned in this (and Drafts’) forum more than once, is the one big downside of this amazing mobile note taking app. (The smaller one, by the way, I would say, is non-sensitive tags.)
So I use an action to send all my notes to DEVONthink’s Global Inbox; tagged, so a Smart Rule can move them to specific locations. Unlike @cornchip I don’t delete the notes in Drafts after sending them but I have set the action to move them to the Archive and tag them “DEVONthink” so I can easily look them up if ever necessary. This is nothing at all like sync or indexing, just an additional backup.
Although being a huge Drafts fan I also use another app for note taking you might take a look at too: Just Press Record. Which does exactly what it name says: One button to record audio notes, of course on the Apple Watch too.
And this is why two apps for the same purpose: Drafts, like all other writing apps, does live voice-to-text transcription. That works more or less well, until a) the internet connection is wonky, b) you use words (or a even a whole different language) the voice-to-text algorithm does not recognize, or c) the environment is noisy. The latter might be most significant for you, because you probably often face machine noises and wind on a construction site.
Here Just Press Record (or a similar app) might come handy for you: It records audio and keeps it. It does the voice-to-text transcription later one the iPhone, iPad or Mac. So when the algorithm does screw up you can still listen to the recording and correct the transcript manually.
It is possible to share both single audio recordings and transcripts from Just Press Record, but you can also set it to save its audio recordings (not the transcripts, sadly) to an iCloud folder. Which DEVONthink can index, import and, since DT 4, transcribe.
It is also possible to use Shortcuts at a time interval to execute a Drafts action to send Drafts into DEVONthink. I use it as a catch all for Drafts I have forgotten to manually action.
