Another probably simple issue, but I can’t seem to get past it. I would like to import notes from other apps (Bear, Evernote etc) so I’m using Watched Folders. Which works fine. Except that I can’t add any extra attributes, or edit existing ones, so long as those folders are watched, because the source file will overwrite the metadata, or just delete it, on the next pass.
I thought one way to do it would be to set up an agent to move notes from the Tinderbox container, but of course that just ends up creating multiple copies as the source folder keeps replacing moved notes. So that doesn’t seem to work.
I assume the other three options would be to:
delete or somehow rename the source files in the Watched Folders once they’d been copied into TBX;
copy the TBX container and then remove the Watched Folder action;
remove the Watched Folder action in the original container.
But none of these seem v satisfying if you’re trying to combine watching a live folder (so your Tinderbox is updating itself with extra files from the Watched Folder) with actually working with those imported notes in Tinderbox by adding attributes, adornments etc.
What am I missing? Another way is just dragging the files into Tinderbox but that also seems to carry problems with it. Help, as ever, much appreciated.
Watched notes are really meant to be an inbox — a way to move information captured on your phone or mobile device into a Tinderbox project. The expectation is you’d copy whatever you needed, put that into notes that slot into the rest of the project, and ultimately delete the watched notes.
What you really want to do, I think, is Import some documents or files into Tinderbox. You can do that with copy/paste, or by dragging items into the outline or map pane.
Thanks, mark, (@eastgate), that makes sense. The reason I’ve gone with Watched folders is that it seems to do a better job of importing, at least for some file types and apps.
Dragging Evernote notes into TBX, for example, doesn’t seem to work for me.
And I find dragging emails from Apple Mail inconsistent – sometimes the body of the email joins the move, sometime it doesn’t. I’ve tried on different machines with the same, inconsistent, result. It doesn’t seem to matter whether the email is text, HTML or rich text, there doesn’t seem to be a pattern.
Apple Mail is notoriously buggy in forming drags, and its drags are undocumented. It’s Apple’s issue; we have no control. That said, copy/paste is generally straightforward.
Copy/Paste should also be fine for Evernote; I’ve added an issue to get Evernote drags to operate through the same mechanism as watched folders.