[Discussion] Is Scribble Useless? / Goodnotes Drag and Drop

I like the idea of Scribble but I’m finding it impossible to get along with in Drafts. Should I persist with it? Or are other people also finding it a pain?

(Writing this question was problematic - so maybe it’s a general problem of mine.)

Scribble is great for search boxes IF you only enter plain text.

@nahumck wrote on MacStories that he is using it in Drafts for journals.

I loved the idea but have not dived deeper into it.

I think the scribble engine of Apple is not jet at full customer satisfaction level.

I like your Germlish typo “not jet”. I guess you meant “nicht jetzt”. :slight_smile: But I tease. :frowning:

Thanks for your reply. And I’m glad @nahumck at least has made the leap.

There have been two identifiable issues so far for me:

  • A tendency to start new paragraphs when I just want to continue writing the sentence I’ve started. Not a Drafts issue.
  • Difficulty in getting Scribble to insert text at the Drafts cursor. Maybe a Drafts issue, probably not.

I’m obviously on the steep part of the learning curve with Scribble. I’ll keep trying and learning - as Scribble might be viable and useful.

I’ve tried it a few times, mostly to test compatibility, but honestly can’t think of a case where it would be more efficient that typing in Drafts.

I get it’s usefulness in mixed drawing/note-taking environments, or could see it being useful popping out a Drafts slide-over for a quick thought while using the pencil for something else, but can’t personally see me using it in Drafts beyond that.

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Right. I just thought I’d try it.

Given I’ve enabled Back Tap (2 taps) to create a new draft - on my phone - I have better ways to jot stuff down.

I played around with it during the beta period but quickly found it’s not really worth it. Might be great for quick idea capturing but longer note taking (like in a meeting or something) isn’t really usable. Sticking with Good Notes for now. It’d be cool if Drafts had a handwriting interface to it, but not sure if that fits with the how Drafts operates.

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Agreed — I find it far more satisfying and efficient to write in goodnotes then dragging and dropping into drafts - that conversion is magical.

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What do you drag into drafts? The handwritten note?!

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Yes - it converts automatically to text. Much easier process than fiddling with scribble imho. https://www.macstories.net/reviews/goodnotes-adds-drag-and-drop-flexibility/

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They is awesome! Thank you. Will definitely be trying that out today.

So that’s a conversion on the way out of GoodNotes rather than on the way into Drafts, right?

(And, yes, I have GoodNotes so this will work for me.)

Stray thought: It would be interesting to drag a Taskpaper list out of GoodNotes into OmniFocus.

I’ve never been able to get the drag and drop work directly to omnifocus - I usually need to go to Drafts first, since omnifocus views the dragged handwriting as a .png file. (Things 3 works, btw, but not as taskspaper, so you end up with a single task with several lines). But if you do get this to work, let me know!

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Sounds like a drag out of GoodNotes contains multiple renderings - and OmniFocus picks the image rather than the text. But I will experiment.

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This surely could be modified… https://www.peerreviewed.io/blog/sending-hand-written-tasks-from-goodnotes-to-todoist-using-shortcuts
EDIT: And it does - I have modified that shortcut. Not as quick as a drag and drop, but with this you can “convert” then run the shortcut and it adds them all to Omnifocus. Neat. I anyone knows how to include a step in shortcuts to convert text to task spaper, then this would be really useful!

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Are you willing to share your modificatation

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Let me know if this works https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/36d502814ef747d5b5385b9ca1a516ce

Replaced Omnifocus with Drafts.
Still needs some thinking or tinkering

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I still think drag and drop (or just copy/paste) is faster with drafts - this was an effort to get around the restrictions within Omnifocus.

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