This is part 1 of a two part series on integrating Drafts with Evernote, written by Brett Kelly, author of Evernote Essentials. When you're done with this article, be sure to read part 2, Using Drafts with Evernote: Advanced, to learn about creating custom Evernote actions and using Drafts' tags. Get more great tips on Brett's site.
Drafts has several built-in actions that can easily send text to your Evernote account. To begin using Drafts with Evernote, you’ll first need to give Drafts permission to access your Evernote account.
Connecting Drafts to your Evernote Account
Before you can do any of this, you’ll need to allow Drafts to access your Evernote account. Connecting your Evernote account is simple, especially if you have the Evernote app installed on your device:
- Launch Drafts and tap the Settings (gear) icon at the bottom right of the screen.
- Tap “Configure accounts” on the Settings screen.
- Tap the “Link” button next to Evernote.
If you have the Evernote app installed on your device—and you’re currently logged in to Evernote in the app—the Evernote app will launch and you’ll be prompted to authorize Drafts to access your Evernote account. This screen will describe exactly which abilities Drafts will have:
If you don’t have the Evernote app installed, Drafts will open a web page on Evernote’s web site prompting you to login to Evernote. Once you log in, you’ll see the same prompt to allow Drafts to access your account.
It’s important to note that, in either case, Drafts never sees your Evernote login credentials.
After you’ve given Drafts access to your account, you’ll be taken back to Drafts. If you reopen the Settings screen, the Evernote button that read “Link” before will now read “Unlink”. Tapping this button revokes Drafts’ ability to access your Evernote account.
A Tour of Drafts’ Built-in Evernote Actions
Drafts ships with three built-in actions for saving content to your Evernote account. In this section, we’ll briefly discuss what each one does.
Save to Evernote
This one works just like it sounds: whatever is in the current Draft is added as a new note in your Evernote account. This action won’t include any formatting or anything; the contents of the new Evernote note will the text exactly as it appears in Drafts.
By default, the new note will appear in the default notebook in your Evernote account and the note title will be the date and time the draft was sent to Evernote. These behaviors can be configured differently if you choose (we’ll get to how that’s done in a bit).
Append to Monthly Journal
Running this action will add the current draft to a note in your Evernote account whose title is “Journal-YYYY-MM” (where YYYY is the current year and MM is the numeric representation of the current month; something like “Journal–2015–01”).
If this note doesn’t exist, it will be automatically created. If it does exist, the contents of the draft will be added to the end of the note, prepended with the current date:
Evernote as Todos
Notes in Evernote can contain simple checkboxes, which Evernote calls “todos.” This action will take the current draft and create a new note in Evernote with each line representing a separate todo:
This draft, after running “Evernote as Todos,” will look like this in Evernote:
Notice that, with this action, the first line of the draft is used as the title of the Evernote note and each subsequent line is added as a todo. We’ll get into how this works in a later section.
Installing Evernote Actions from the Actions Directory
The three actions that ship with Drafts are just the beginning. Because Drafts actions can be created and customized by its users, the community have created several Evernote actions for Drafts that are available in the Drafts Action Directory.
Finding and installing these actions is quite simple. From within Drafts, tap the action icon at the top right of the screen to reveal your current action list. Tap the plus, then tap “Visit Action Directory.”
Browse the existing actions and, if you find one that seems useful, just tap “Install” on the action page. You’ll be taken to Drafts and informed that the action has been installed and it will now be available in the actions menu.
Popular Evernote Actions in the Action Directory
A common use case for Drafts users is to draft their text in Markdown before sending it to other apps (including Evernote). Two actions, both available via the Actions Directory, allow you to compose your draft using Markdown and send the text to Evernote as rich text.
The first action is “Markdown to Evernote (title).” When this action is run on a draft, the first line of the draft will be the title of the resulting note in Evernote. Everything after the first line will be processed as Markdown text and the converted rich text will appear as the body of the Evernote note.
For example, if I create a draft that looks like this…
And run “Markdown to Evernote (title),” the note created in Evernote will look like this:
You can install “Markdown to Evernote (title)” from the Action Directory.
The “Markdown to Evernote (timestamp)” action behaves almost exactly like the previous action, except the title of the resulting Evernote note will be a timestamp showing the date and time the note was created and the entire draft will become the body of the note (after being processed as Markdown).
You can install “Markdown to Evernote (timestamp)” from the Action Directory.
Sending a Draft to the Evernote App
In some instances, you may want to send a draft directly to the Evernote iOS app instead of saving it via the Evernote API.
If your device isn’t connected to the Internet, Drafts won’t be able to communicate to Evernote’s API and, thus, won’t be able to send data to Evernote.
Sending your draft to the Evernote app is helpful if you want to immediately modify the note after it’s been created. For instance, the “Note+Camera in Evernote” action will immediately switch to the Evernote app, insert the contents of the draft into the note body, then launch the system camera so you can take a photo to attach to the note.
We’ll cover how to create custom actions that interact with the Evernote iOS app in the next section, but for know, just know that it’s possible.
The Evernote app also provides a Share extension which can be used along with Drafts "Share" action to save text to Evernote while offline. The Share extension also allows for user-selection of the Notebook so can be a handy option. Read more about the Evernote share extension on MacStories.
This is part 1 of a two part series on integrating Drafts with Evernote, written by Brett Kelly, author of Evernote Essentials. When you're done with this article, be sure to read part 2, Using Drafts with Evernote: Advanced, to learn about creating custom Evernote actions and using Drafts' tags. Get more great tips on Brett's site.
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