Use Dropbox to Create a Yojimbo iPhone App

Yesterday I read that DropBox announced their new iPhone app, and it occurred to me that you could set up the Dropbox iPhone app to clip images directly into Yojimbo with very minimal effort.  I was so pumped.  This was a total game changer.

Here’s how to do it:

(Note:  I’m assuming that you have Yojimbo installed on your Mac and Dropbox installed on both your iPhone and Mac.  If not, download Dropbox here and Yojimbo here.)

1. On your Mac, create a new folder called “Clip to Yojimbo” in your Dropbox folder:

2.  Copy and past the below code into Script Editor.  This will become a folder action that runs anytime a file is added to the “Clip to Yojimbo” folder (note: you will have to enable folder actions if they are not already set up).  Save the script to your Mac’s Library/Scripts/Folder Actions folder as “import to Yojimbo” or whatever name you like.

on adding folder items to this_folder after receiving these_items
	repeat with x from 1 to the count of these_items
		set theFile to item x of these_items
		try
			tell application "Yojimbo"
				import theFile
			end tell
		end try
	end repeat
end adding folder items to

Note for Scripters:  You can certainly get a little fancier with the Applescript, i.e. move the picture to an archive folder after the import is complete, etc. but this is all you need to get the basic import done.

3.  Assign the “import to Yojimbo” folder action to the “Clip to Yojimbo” folder.

4. That’s it.  Now it is time to test it out.  Go to your iPhone, go to DropBox and navigate to the “Clip to Yojimbo” folder. Take a picture.

5. If you are at your Mac, you will see the picture almost immediately show up in the Dropbox folder.

6.  A couple seconds later, it will import right into Yojimbo.

You’re done.  Pretty cool, right?  You can watch the whole process happen in real time on your Mac if you have the Finder open to the “Clip to Yojimbo” folder alongside an open Yojimbo window.  It is almost instantaneous.  The lack of an iPhone app for Yojimbo was the reason I started using Evernote, so this is pretty exciting.   It probably just swung my decision pendulum back to using Yojimbo.

Tagged as: applescript, dropbox, folder action, yojimbo