I’m a soon-to-be Evernote former user coming to Devinthink to Go in no small part for the excellent clipping capabilities. I’ve not decided yet if I’m going to use DEVONthink Pro as my desktop Evernote replacement, or possibly that plus Obsidian…or OneNote, or Apple Notes, or I suppose Google docs.
A key thing I’d like to do is
regularly copy or export out items I’ve clipped into DTTG to one of these other apps
and then tag or move the items within DTTG to indicate they’ve been processed).
There could be a few different ways these items could be transferred — simplest seems to be using Shortcuts to copy (or create) the file to another folder in iCloud. For example, if the destination is Obsidian, that’d be placing a copy of the item/file in the appropriate folder within iCloud Drive’s Obsidian directory.
But I’ve not been successful in actually getting a proper file an item from shortcuts. For instance the shortcut in the screenshot below results in blank text files with the item names being created in the Obisdian folder “Clippings”. The plumbing works, so to speak, haha. But the important part isn’t getting done.
Is there a correct way to accomplish this? Or if not through shortcuts, any other methods?
In any case, you should investigate how/if you get your documents out of these apps. Apple Notes, for example, is a one-way silo.
As to your shortcut: I guess that items are – items, plural. What, then, is get the content of item "items" supposed to do? I don’t use shortcuts, ever, but I suppose that you’ll have to get a single item from DT.
And the last action is weird: Moving something from one place to the same place doesn’t make any sense at all. Is “Obisdian” just another app or just a typo?
There’s a ton of posts here on combining DT(TG) with Obsidian. Personally, I’d not try to automate anythig with Shortcuts on iOS, but rather with scripting on macOS.
I can think of a few ways to do it on a Mac. But I’m looking for a way to do it semi-automatically on the iPhone, for several reasons.
As for the DT and Obsidian integrations, the ones I’ve seen seem to be around being able to see DT items in Obsidian, but not actually transferring the items/files into the Obsidian.
Regarding that last action, yeah I noticed what you point out after posting. I’m not completely clear on DT/DTTG data structure and representation. I guess it should be moved to another database.
Since posting, I was able to make this work by specifying an exact item in the Get Content of Item action. It works well for markdown and PDF clippings. Haven’t come up with a solution for the web archives; it does send the .webarchive to the Obsidian directory, but of course it’s not able to be opened in Obsidian. But I haven’t yet figured out how to get it to iterate through multiple documents located in a particular location.
The portability of formats is an important factor. Which is why I’m considering maintaining DEVONthink and another product in parallel. The lack of folder-shareability and cloud-based database location in DT just dont meet the needs I have with a good percentage of the documents that’ll be in it (and are currently in Evernote) being family-related records and files that need to be shared and accessible to others in the family, and not dependent on anyone else having access to a particular computer or phone (like in the event of disaster or my not being alive). DT server edition is an obvious possibility, but not worth it to me based on price and that (I think) one has to host it yourself.
The Get Items of Group action “returns [items] as array”, per the action description. An array is a list of items. You can’t use the action Get Content of on this list, because the list itself is not a DTTG item. Repeat with Each is the action that iterates through a list.
Good question. It doesn’t do a great job of it, and not as easy as as well as Evernote or Apple notes, for example. But it gets closer than DEVONthink.
As ai understand it, a vault can be shared/collaborated on, with exclusions (which is opposite of what I’d like, but it gets the job done), and. And worst case, the raw files and folder structure are accessible in iCloud, and can be shared via the “Collaborate” feature on ios/MacOS.
