…and the worst part is; I really wanted to love this product.
On an iPad Pro, ios15.
I go to this URL https://www.rac.ca/operating/bandplans/ and touch and hold on the band plan image > Share > Devonthink > Capture Image > Done
What I’m expecting is the image of the bandplan is now safe in Devonthink for when I go offline ready for me to use.
Unfortunately, as this has happened many times before (sending things from a browser to Devonthink using the share sheet and those things not being available afterward) I hop on over to check if it did what it should have.
Of course it didnt, I have a link instead, not a captured image, a link only.
Useless to me. Why can I not trust this software, I was led to believe this is an established well matured product, how is this still happening.
Hey, thanks for getting back so quick, gotta say a lot of passionate folk behind Devon stuff, part of the love I have for it. Loyalists!
Absolutely, yes don’t get me wrong. It’s undoubtedly a mess of a Wordpress implementation and there’s a JS viewer of sorts, I totally understand. I used inspector to fish out the actual link (https://www.rac.ca/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Bandplan1-1.jpg) for the real image > share > devonthink > capture image, works beautifully.
I just want Devonthink to tell me when it cannot do something I want to have it do so I can get on, instead of keep checking up on it. Oh you noticed the saving grace too, yes it may fail silently but gotta bless it for not leaving me in the lurch completely and at the very least keeping the link to said resource.
I wonder when DTTG actually becomes aware that it cannot capture the content. Assuming it doesn’t know until the share sheet has closed and you have returned to the original app, would you want an iOS notification (banner) then? Something along the lines of “couldn’t get content, captured link instead”; should also be a notification of success, “captured contents”, also be displayed?
Perhaps Eric could comment on the technical feasibility (@eboehnisch, I wonder if you could take a look at this thread, pls)?
The share extension (Clip to DEVONthink) operates completely independent from the main app; that’s how it work iOS. From the web browser it never received the image but just the URL of the image. It offers hopefully sensible options, then saves the data for the app. When you now open DEVONthink To Go, it finds the breadcrumbs left behind by the extension and tries to do what it’s being asked to do: download the image. If the image is, e.g., behind a paywall, it is out of reach and the app just does the one thing it can do now: save the URL as a bookmark.
I have added an additional check to ensure that the mime type of the url conforms to an image, if it doesn’t then the “Capture Image” option will be disabled. This will highlight that the link as in this case https://www.rac.ca/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Bandplan1-1.jpg is invalid as an image or is not accessible.
In iOS, if you send something to DTTG, but then don’t open DTTG, it is not validated by the application. I send whatever I need into DTTG, and then when finished, open DTTG and I see it accepting all sent stuff.
Does anyone here use Drafts at all? Drafts appears to understand the outcome of an action and shows a banner confirming if say, something is copied to clipboard etc.
The mimetype check is for sure excellent and the right way forward. Perhaps querying the size of an image could work, if it’s zero, it’s not an image? Even query if the link is a 401,404 using a GET?
