✱ Dropbox actions with Drafts
It’s no secret that I absolutely love Drafts from developer Greg Pierce. Some friends have asked what kind of rules I use in conjunction with the also sweet Launch Center Pro. I figured I’d take a few minutes to write something up, so here goes…
Scratchpad rule
One of the things I do is keep a general scratchpad in Dropbox. All sorts of notes go in this file, but it’s generally things I don’t want to forget. Here’s the multi-part process of setting this up.
First, set up the scratchpad file in Dropbox. It can be wherever you want, and named whatever you want, just make sure you remember so that you can point Drafts in the right direction. Then you’ll want to start building the rule in Drafts. This isn’t as hard as it sounds.
Create a new Dropbox action in Drafts –mine is named Add to Scratchpad. Then choose the path in Dropbox, and tap Predefined in the File section. For the Write section, pick Append. Then we get to the template. You can get creative here. Here’s my template:
[[date|%Y-%m-%d %I:% %p]]:[[draft]]
This setup allows me to have output like this:
2013-03-08 7:03 AM:
Living room window
- 8’ sill piece
- 47” 1/2” quarter round x 2
- 8’ 1/2” quarter round x 2
- 55” side molding x 2
- 106” top/bottom molding x 2
Sweet right? Okay, so now we have the Drafts rule all set up. So now to Launch Center Pro —which is easy. Simply create a new action —I called mine “Scratchpad”— and choose the “Custom URL” option. Then you’ll want to add an x-callback-URL similar to this —depending on how you named your files:
drafts://x-callback-url/create?text=[prompt]&action=Add%20to%20Scratchpad&action=LCP&x-success=launchpro://
That’s it. The action will prompt you for text, send it to Drafts.
You’ll also need to create another Drafts rule that runs the append rule and sends you back to LCP. In URL Actions in Drafts, name a new action LCP and add this as the URL:
drafts://x-callback-url/create?action=Add%20to%20Scratchpad&x-success=launchpro://
This will trigger Drafts to run your Scratchpad rule, and finally, kick you back to Launch Center Pro where you started.
Hope that helped you understand how this works. It sounds complicated, but if I can do it, you can too. If you visit this link, it should import my Drafts rule. Then you just need to make sure you have the correctly named files in Dropbox, and create your LCP action. That’s it! I’m pretty sure that my set of rules could be accomplished much more easily, but this setup works. If you have any problems, or questions let me know.
Note: This whole post was written in Textastic on my iPhone. Forgive me if there are clumsy errors.