I’m sure many of you discovered that the Quick Entry Dialog can be invoked by pressing a keyboard shortcut. In the new version, this does no longer bring up the main application window. If you are on Leopard, the Dialog plays nicely with Spaces as well.
Also, the service menu entries for Things are now working again. You can select any text in your current application and go to Services > Things > New To-do Containing Selection as Note/Title. This brings up the Quick Entry Dialog with a pre-populated note or title field. It doesn’t stop there, however, since you can assign keyboard shortcuts for these entries as well. Just go to “Keyboard and Mouse” in the System Preferences and switch to the “Keyboard Shortcuts” tab. Click the + Button and add “New To-do Containing Selection as Note” into the “Menu Title” field:
I use ctrl-alt-shift-space for this, but we are interested in what you are using. Feel free to put your shortcuts into a comment to this post.
But wait, there is more! Many of you wanted to be able to include references to files and mails in to-dos. Starting today, you can do this in one of the following ways:
- Drag and drop a file from the Finder onto the notes section of a to-do.
- Drag and drop a file onto the main application icon in the dock. This will bring up the Quick Entry Dialog with the notes field pre-populated.
- You can perform the above operations using email messages as well (requires Apple Mail 3.1).
- You can select one or more files in the Finder and use the keyboard shortcut you defined before (ctr-alt-shift-space in my case).
8 Comments
The mere fact that Quick Entry now works correctly in Leopard is awesome, let alone all the other improvements. Well done. I use alt-space to bring it up.
This is very nice. I discovered that it will also accept other types of links – for example I am able to drag and drop a Journlr entry, and it will create a proper link to it.
Taking the “New To-do Containing Selection as Note” service a step further, it would be nice to have something like the F-key trick in iGTD, which creates a new entry using the currently selected object for a number of supported applications. For example, at the moment, the new to-do service does nothing when a Mail message is selected (only if its text is selected), but it would be nice if it would create the entry with a link to the email message.
Awesome… I really like being able to drag a file or email into the notes field – definitely saves time.
I am using ctrl-alt-space.
The Quick Entry pane is very nice. I’m using SHIFT-OPT-CMD-SPACE as my trigger.
One request, though… In the “Where” pull-down menu it would be wonderful if your actual projects, areas and people were selectable, so you could quickly add a task to the appropriate section, instead of having to go in the application afterwards and moving it to the correct location.
Since you asked, I use the following shortcuts:
Quick Entry: Control-Option-\
New To-do Containing Selection as Note: Control-Option-n
New To-do Containing Selection as Title: Control-Option-t
If I use the quick entry to copy a URL and the web site URL starts with https: which is used by secure sites ( my online bill sites ) Things does not recognize it as a web link. I do however love the Quick Entry — especially the hint of being able to make keyboard shortcut — and also the fact the program does not then display.
rrDog
The “Fkey” trick in iGTD has also become essential to my workflow, especially for managing email via MailTags, but also for URLs. Do you think this functionality could be added? Do you need more information about it?
Love this program! Took a tour of Omnifocus, and the only thing I like better in their program so far is that when I capture a selection from a webpage it captures the link to the page along with the text. Also, like being able to capture a link to an email using just a keyboard command instead of having to drag and drop. Is that possible?