Hi,
I’m new to Drafts and have installed it everywhere from my Apple Watch, various iOS devices to my Macs… but I’m missing something.
I have captured a couple dozen notes on the go and now I want to transfer them in plain text form to another application; the device is irrelevant, whichever works best for this.
Naively I just went onto my Mac, selected all the notes that I wanted to copy & paste and dragged them over to the Notion Mac app… and nothing happens. I tried again into a plain text editor… and nothing again. It does not work with any text field anywhere… so now I have a bunch of text in Drafts, which as I understand is supposed to be “where text starts” but I can’t drag the text to anywhere!?
The only solution seems to be to copy and paste the text manually from each note or have an application-specific “action” tailored for that particular use (The “copy to notion” action does not work and the “send to notion” action requires setting up API access… surely I’m missing something basic.
The situation seems to be the same on iPad OS, drag & drop does nothing.
Any insights into how this should work would be appreciated.
Thanks in advance,
Frank
Not to get too technical, but when you drag something (on Mac or iOS), the source application (in this case Drafts) provides a description of what it can provide to a target application if it accepts the drag. Drafts provides “plain text” as an option for drafts dragged directly from the list, but as to what can happen with that is up to the target application to accept or refuse. Not many support directly receiving multiple objects in this sort of format (just as you can’t drag multiple notes from Notes to many things).
Drafts generally works through it’s actions to export content. There are many actions, which support many different destinations - including other applications, files, web services. Using actions also is part of the workflow in that your various captured texts can be processed automatically by your actions - be tagged, archived, deleted, etc.
The case of Notion is not a great example because they have limited connectivity options. They have only just launched a beta of an API in the last couple of weeks, and it’s not well suited to use with Drafts in the same way as many APIs, and their app does not support directly integration via URL schemes or AppleScript.
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Thanks for the quick reply.
Your app looks like it gets a lot of TLC and that’s why I’m a bit surprised that this does not work for me.
I’m a Mac indie developer myself and I do know about pasteboards, flavors, etc… on my end, however, even dragging a single note from the “Inbox” sidebar list into a TextEdit document just does nothing. There does not seem to be a plain text flavor on the pasteboard. I haven’t checked in Xcode exactly which flavors are vended, but it’s not a Notion-specific behavior.
When I drag another note from the Inbox sidebar into the text area of Drafts, it does behave just as expected and adds the plaintext of the dragged note to the text area… but it does no such thing anywhere else. It could just be MAS sandboxing issue?
What I would have expected to happen in the multi-notes drag would be to have a merged version of the notes in chronological order, perhaps with an extra newline between notes.
This type of simple plain text integration would work pretty much everywhere and save you having to build custom integrations everywhere.
Thanks for your time.