Drafts – Review – Step up your productivity
App Type: Uncategorized
Our rating: 
By: Agile Tortoise
Version #: 2.0.1
Date Released: 2012-09-06
Developer: Agile Tortoise
Price: 1.99
User Rating:
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On one hand the iOS has enabled us to be more productive than ever before, while on the other hand the iOS has imposed several limits on what we can do. The handling of files and their transfer between applications is one of the most poignant of these limits. Where a desktop computer is a file-centric system, the iOS is an app-centric system that wants you to forget about management of the data and just get down the manipulation and consumption. There have been attempts, especially in the jail breaking community to fix this with Finder-like apps for files management, but these all seem to break the interface style of the iOS platform. Is there an app out there that can give you back some control of our data while still giving you the convenience of the iOS philosophy.
Drafts is positioning itself to be that app. This plain text editor wants it to be where you go first for any kind of short form writing. Sending a text? Drafts can do it. Posting to Facebook or Twitter? Drafts is right there. While this may seem pedestrian to most, its just cracking the surface of what Drafts can do.
When you open Drafts, you are put directly into an editor with a blank page. You can type in both portrait, or landscape. If you just want to make a note for later, Drafts saves your work automatically in a single list of previous drafts. You can search this list to find things you have written in the past. The advantage here is that when you are posting to many different sources, (email, Facebook, Twitter, etc) it can be hard to find a particular post you sent. If you use Drafts as your hub for writing these posts then they are all right here in one spot.
But Drafts isn’t just for keeping notes, in fact, if that were its only purpose, it doesn’t do that great of a job. No, Drafts real strength is in its action menu. From here you have as many as thirty-one different choices of output for your text. Some of which are less obvious than others like being able to add events to the calendar from Drafts. There is Dropbox and Evernote support as well as an ever increasing number of third party apps that have “app actions” so you can have the text sent to your favorite Twitter app, or task management app like OmniFocus, or Things. Use the third-party email client Sparrow? Drafts can send your text to the app instead of opening the iOS default email form.
Speaking of integration, Drafts has support for TextExpander for text macros as well as Terminology which is a fantastic word reference app. The best part is that app you don’t have don’t show up in the list by default. This keeps your list as tidy as possible. You can show or hide any items, as well as rearrange the order to put your most used near the top.
The font size and face can be changes as well as switching on night mode for low light situations. If you are an external keyboard fan, a swipe on the tool bar hides the list and allows you to type full screen. This action also adds a link buttons to the bar that makes Drafts link URLs, phone numbers ,and addresses from within your text. Markdown support is also featured in Drafts with several actions to export text post markup which makes this a great tool for HTML email, or any time you need to quickly generate HTML for your text. Unfortunately there are not any Markdown macros within Drafts so you will have to be fluent in the syntax to really take advantage of this feature.
For most of us, our front page of our iPhones are littered with so many apps that we switch back and forth from copying text from one, pasting into another. The less time we spent shuffling text around the better. Drafts offers its users a single point of origin for almost all text based tasks. Drafts developer, Agile Tortoise seems committed to expanding the reach of this app into every nook and cranny of the iOS space that Apple will allow. If you want to step up your productivity on your mobile device, then give Drafts a try and start writing.
Quick Take
Value:High.
Would I Buy Again:Yes.
Learning Curve:Easy.
Who Is It For:Anyone that needs a central hub for their thoughts.
What I Like:Large number of services and integrations.
What I Don't Like:No Markdown macros.
Final Statement:Drafts is where the ideas begin.
iOS In Drafts you can get that text down quickly and decide what to do with it later. Extensive output options let you send text to Twitter, Facebook, email, SMS, a Calendar event, quickly save it to Dropbox or Evernote – or forward it to a growing list of other Apps such as OmniFocus, Things, The Hit List, Byword, Sparrow and more.
## FEATURES
- QUICK ENTRY: App opens to a new blank draft to quickly jot down ideas.
- SAVE, SEARCH, SYNC: Not sure what to do with that text? Just type it in and leave drafts – no saving, it'll be there when you get back. Recent drafts are always one tap away, and full-text searching is available. Optionally enable Drafts lightning fast sync between Drafts, Drafts for iPad (sold separately) on multiple devices.
- SEND TO...ANYTHING? Extensive output options let you do almost anything you might want with your text. Output options include: Twitter, Facebook, Email, SMS-Messages, Events, Clipboard, "Open in..." export.
- LINK MODE: Capture phone#s, addresses and URLs and link mode makes them tappable links.
- DROPBOX: Link your Dropbox account and a single tap saves drafts to your Dropbox, or appends to a Journal file.
- EVERNOTE: Link an Evernote account and a single tap create a new note based on your draft in the default notebook.
- FORWARD DRAFTS TO OTHER APPS including Tweetbot, Twitter, OmniFocus, Things, Simplenote, Sparrow, The Hit List, Echofon, Due, Byword, WriteUp, Buffer, Bang On, Agenda, Day One, Appigo Todo, Writing Kit and more.
- CUSTOMIZE ACTIONS: Arrange and enabled/disabled actions to avoid clutter. Also, each action has settings to configure whether the action requires confirmation before launch, and if it should automatically create a new draft after completion.
- MARKDOWN SUPPORT: Use [Markdown](https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/) to format text, and Drafts can convert it to HTML. Preview the HTML in Drafts, create a HTML email, or copy it to the clipboard for use in other apps.
- TERMINOLOGY SUPPORT: Drafts integrates with [Terminology Ph](https://agiletortoise.com/terminology), our top ranked dictionary-thesaurus app. With Terminology Ph installed, lookup selected words Terminology – or browse for replacement words and have them inserted back into Drafts without cut and paste.
- THEMES AND FONTS: Customize the writing environment. Drafts ships with a selection of color themes, including a "Night" mode. Choose from over a dozen fonts.
- TEXTEXPANDER SUPPORT
- LANDSCAPE TYPING
- Live word and character counts.
Screenshots
Article By Nathan Kline
Nathan has been an avid Apple user and advocate since the days of the Apple ][. He has always sought to find new ways to make use of technology to assist his daily life. As a paramedic in southern California Nathan brings his familiarity with technology to the field, and at whatsoniphone.com he brings his critical thinking to he analysis of apps and news. You has also written app reviews for the mobile app site Smokinapps.com.
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