Public API (cross-post form Slack)

paul

Chrabia297 posted on Apr 6 with a request about adding items programmatically, either by ‘e-mailing’ to your document(s) or, as I added later in that thread, a means to ‘Post’ to your docs from anywhere.
form details see: https://moodo.slack.com/archives/C99DA3L66/p1617742523055700

Seeing @Jay ’s reply building on the already existing functionality (for the add-ons) this might be a low effort high impact request for many people (also considering the popularity of this request on the previous-previous feedback/community platform: https://feedback.moo.do/forums/274238-general/suggestions/10547064-public-api )

andywine

Hi @Jay and the team! Just pinging here to see if there’s any update on the API 😉 as this is a very old entry now.

I’ve been using Workflowy quite a lot a long time ago, then used Moo.do before it switched to Legend. I still believe this is a great product, and after a break (using Things 3), I came back to Legend. Even though there are a lot of rough edges, there’s really nothing out there quite like it.

Concerning the API usage: my current flow is Obsidian for notes + Legend for GTD. I’d like to quickly create notes and tasks as they appear, and only assign them later to projects or tag them. For notes, it’s easily done with Shortcuts x Obsidian. But with Legend, I don’t see a simple and reliable way to quickly add tasks.

What I’m doing right now is I create one-line notes in Obsidian, then once in a while I move them to Legend, which is an awkward workound in my view.

Just came into this forum – unfortunately I don’t have time to read through the content here; later on, I’ll dig into this thread: https://forum.legendapp.com/d/175-where-should-new-items-created-by-extensionwidgetapi-go (seems related). Other than that, I haven’t been able to find another API thread, so treat this as my big UPVOTE 🙂.

And finally, kudos for building a great product!

LauraH

andywine
Hey Andy -
For quick adding items to Legend -
On mac (and I think on Windows also) - if you look under Legend > Preferences > Desktop - you’ll see options to set Global Hotkeys for “New Item”.
Choose your hot key - then a global hotkey brings up a little “add to Legend” pop up window. If you create an “Inbox” document, you and have the popup always add your item to the “Inbox” and you can categorize / organize latter. You can use the keyboard entry to designate a task [] add dates, etc.

Possibly that might help with your “quick add” challenge?

Jay

We definitely do want to build an API but as LauraH said I think there’s likely an easier solution for doing quick add. Does using that hotkey improve your workflow? Or how could we make quick add better?

paul

Aside from quick add, one of the use cases for the API discussed previously is something like machine to machine comms; maybe my smoke detector (wired into home assistant / home automation hub) could add an item to buy new batteries when it reaches a certain charge level.
Or when I add a new item to my Pocket list; add an item to Legend. LowCodeNoCode tools abound to make something like this work with little effort

andywine

Thanks for your quick replies! 🙂

I think I missed one important detail in my original post – my issue is mainly with mobile quick add/entry.

I am using the global quick add shortcut currently on desktop and it’s great! But on mobile, when I’m on the go and something pops up, I want to add it as quickly as possible. Currently, doing this via the app is sometimes too slow for me to use.

When I open Legend on iOS after a long time of not using it (30m+ ?) the app freezes on a white screen (without any content yet)
If it loads, I can use the “+” button, but then I need to enter stuff and hit “Return” button so it’s registered

Even if the white screen of death is fixed, then the app still loads for several seconds; and I need to get through the UI to enter anything.

Adding an item via an API would allow for a quicker workflow; see how I have it set up for Obsidian:
https://share.cleanshot.com/7GQ0qu.

Jesse

Upvoting and adding more use cases here.

I’ve always wanted to be able to share (with different permission levels) a node and children publically. I’ve wanted to embed them into my portfolio website as my “Ontology” for a while.

I’m going to try to set up a system that scrapes a specific node and it’s children into a json that feeds into my code, but would be alot easier and neater to do a call.

Also one of my hobbies is helping edit and maintain Awesome lists on github and Legend has a really cool markdown editing view. I basically use legend mainly for that purpose. I would like to create a github plugin at one point that calls legend to update an awesome list (or put in a PR) and updates my legend doc automatically.

justyannicc

Giving another use case:
I use reclaim. So I want to be able to give a task a tag like #todoist. It gets sent into todoist and reclaim can schedule it automatically.