Contextual capture & improved console

I am very happy to present you Routine Desktop 0.16 which comes with a new powerful mechanism called contextual capture.

Routine Desktop 0.16 release video

🍾 New Features

A new powerful contextual capture mechanism has been rolled out to make it easier to capture information in your work environment: websites, text, content in apps and more.

Selected text/item

Select text on any website/app and open the dashboard. The console will now offer to save the context the information is coming from.

If possible Routine will also save the URL, allowing you to easily navigate back to the original item e.g Web page.

This can be used on any app to capture text from Slack, Discord, Apple Notes, VS Code etc. but also on Spotify, Notion etc. if you select an item. Basically any app that supports copying information.

Contextual capture selected text

Website

With browsers, you can even open the dashboard without selecting/highlighting text and Routine will fetch the website’s title and favicon, allowing you to bookmark Web pages in a fraction of second.

Contextual capture websites

For tasks, the context (app, icon, possible URL) will be displayed next to it. For notes, an hyperlink will be added at the end of the saved information.

Contextually-captured items in the inbox

Note that:

It is only available on macOS for now
Firefox is not supported because the community is still waiting for a fix (it’s been 22 years)

Check this guide for more information on how to activate the contextual capture integration.

🚀 This functionality is only available to Believers. Upgrade now!

✂️ Improvements

The console has been improved to support creating multi-line notes

Open the dashboard, start typing and press SHIFT+ENTER to create a new line at which point the console will switch to multi-line.

⚠️ Be careful, pressing ENTER will submit the creating of a note while SHIFT+ENTER will create a new line.

Multi-line notes creation in console

The console can now create notes along with bullet and enum points when redirecting

Add bullet/enum/etc. to an object’s notes

💡 Tips

The contextual capture mechanism can be used to turn your emails into tasks, notes etc. This is particularly useful until the Gmail integration is opened up to the general public.

Contextual capture to bypass the Gmail integration

🎯 Coming Next

Next are coming functionalities to improve the ability to visualize information, link information together and take notes; more specifically:

References: to link objects together and use backlinks
Custom types: this will allow you to define more object types

Particularly useful as it will be possible to create and capture contextually objects of different types through the console

Filtered views: allowing you to query your knowledge graph and display information through various layouts

For more information, do not hesitate to refer to the roadmaps and upvote for your favorite features.

🤗 Shout Outs

thorbar, romap0, gavin, juice, William W., jabulafia93, pqseags, niklassternberg, renanalves, carljust, mike.cozart, IceIceIce, nommermon, lcx979, adrienfillon, p.andreasberndt, maye.alexandre, singh, Sairam11, alex, Jan De W., Jürgen B., Tom N., miguel.costa, blendt3c, xela1712, Felix, smtnr, john, elessar6171, .fxf., nathanmoorby, t3mccann, rexx.0569, mochakitkat, tom_cnf, simon, jennifer_oloff-lewis, Tran P., xneom, André M., nick, damokles_, Fredrik B., arturo.b, Ayham, Thiago P., sathwikc, david, Gustavo F., MV B., linskling, Andrea Tseng (Lucid D., Nidhin M., jenniferxvu, paulhugopalmeostudio, dg2mrk, danidcd, Kishly C., wolfgang1013, sara.walker, m0rdi0, real_saitama, amb1305, Olivier V., Kian H., loller02, dodge, vigram.personal, kim007dus, worldmain, Abdelhalim S., John G., Eva D., JT, niklas