streamlined capture on iphone

[Skip Collins <skip.collins@gmail.com>]

MobileOrg on the iPhone is not very useful to me. As many people do, I
use my iPhone as a way to capture input on the go, usually in the form
of short text snippets or notes. One thing that has made this work
better for me is a streamlined process for getting the text into Org
via org-feed. My preferred iOS text editor is Drafts 4 ($10) because
it allows custom actions to be performed in a single tap. I have one
action in Drafts that emails the current note to my gmail account. Any
iOS editor that can share notes via email will work. But Drafts is
particularly convenient because the customized action takes care of
addressing and sending the message with one tap.

Using a filter, gmail applies the label "capture" to each note sent
from Drafts. The magic happens through a Google script that I found,
modified, and adapted that takes all messages with a specific label in
Gmail and turns them into an Atom feed. The script runs on Google's
servers, constantly scanning for new messages with the "capture"
label. The resulting Atom feed is served up by Google via a URL
(non-secure, but quite obscure) that I use with org-feed. My Org is
set up to check the feed for new posts every 5 minutes or so, grab
them and put them as headlines into capture.org. When I start up Org,
I tag and refile new items from capture.org into an appropriate file
such as actions.org or projects.org. This workflow automates the whole
capture process as much as possible.

If anyone is interested in the Drafts action, Gmail filter, Google
script, and org-feed configuration that make this work, I would be
happy to share. This setup can easily be adapted for Android phones.