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Posts tagged with "drafts"

iOS Automation and Workflows with Drafts

The latest update to Drafts – a “quick note capturing” app that I’ve covered several times on MacStories – adds a series of features aimed at increasing the possibilities of workflows automation on iOS devices. Obviously, this is something I’m interested in.

It seems like enabling users to save time while using apps has been a common thread in the past few months. The success of Launch Center Pro probably “raised awareness” in regards to the whole concept of URL schemes, but it’s been the increased adoption of x-callback-url and interest in automated workflows that proves better inter-app communication is something that (at least) third-party developers are thinking about. Google included a powerful URL scheme in Google Maps and Google Chrome; more recently, Mr. Reader showed how to enable a “services menu” by requiring users to mix URL schemes from other apps with parameters for an article’s title or selected text. These aren’t ideal solutions, but it’s all we have for now.

Greg Pierce, creator of the x-callback-url specification, has improved Drafts in ways that not only make the app more useful to get text onto other services, but also broaden the possibilities for automation through the use of URL schemes.

There are three main new features in the new Drafts: Dropbox actions, URL actions, and an improved URL scheme with support for callbacks and action triggers. I am going to explain how they work and include various actions and bookmarklets to demonstrate different use cases. Read more

Drafts 2.2 Adds Custom Email Actions

Agile Tortoise’s Drafts for iPhone and iPad is one of my most-used apps for iOS. It sits on the Home screen of both my devices, and I rely on it to send text to a variety of apps and services. With a combination of support for URL schemes and external APIs, Drafts has become a fantastic way to get text saved somewhere else quickly. Plus, we’ve been following Drafts here at MacStories for a while now, and the app underwent quite the evolution recently.

After the major 2.0 update (our review here), I have been looking forward to version 2.2. Released today (app is version 1.2 on the iPad), Drafts now includes new actions for Nebulous Notes (a personal favorite of mine), Netbot, Notefile, and Pastebot. It’s also got a new “Use First Line as Title” setting and advanced options for actions.

More importantly, Drafts 2.2 comes with support for custom email actions, which is the reason I’ve been using Captio for the past two years. It’s with a bit of sadness that I drop Captio, but the app hasn’t even been updated for the iPhone 5 yet, and Drafts does so much more. Custom email actions allow you to send emails to predefined addresses using either your own email accounts, or a background service provided by Agile Tortoise. Read more

Drafts 2.0: New Fonts, New Look, A Brand New Kind of Sync, And Now On iPad

"Drafts are made for a writer who does. Who writes with pen or just two thumbs. When the ink runs dry and the lock screen glows. Swipe right, tap Drafts, and then compose."

“Drafts are made for a writer who does. Who writes with pen or just two thumbs. When the ink runs dry and the lock screen glows. Swipe right, tap Drafts, and then compose.”

I like to think of Drafts as the Field Notes of iOS. It’s inexpensive yet of high quality, unassuming but sharp, highly portable and convenient. While the icon, a simple white chiclet key, doesn’t emphasize Draft’s suave user interface, it is symbolic of the keyboard shortcut for Safari and other browsers, where ‘command + D’ adds the open webpage as a bookmark. The name Drafts itself may curtail ideas of long-form note-taking, although it’s not antagonistic towards writers feeling inspired to write more than a few sentences. Drafts is considerably the everyman’s notebook, unfraught with bindings and covers, instead fitted between two panes of glass in Apple’s iPhones.

Drafts, for those whom haven’t read the original review, is simply a digital notebook for capturing thoughts, lists, and ideas in plain text or Markdown. Those ideas can then be shared with social networks like Twitter or Facebook, your email or calendar, with friends on Messages, to a capturing tool like Evernote, or into a folder on Dropbox. If you’d like, you can use it like Birdhouse for drafting Tweets, or you can use it like Notes for grocery lists and reminders. No matter how you use it, your journal is held together in a simple list, organized by date last accessed, and is quickly searchable.

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Drafts 1.2 Saves Quick Notes To Evernote, Facebook→

Drafts 1.2 Saves Quick Notes To Evernote, Facebook

Agile Tortoise released version 1.2 of its “quick note-taking” app Drafts today, adding support for Facebook and Evernote. As an Evernote user, the addition is more than welcome, as I now have the possibility of quickly saving a time-stamped note into my account in seconds. Previously, I used FastEver for this functionality. I don’t post to Facebook much, but the integration sounds handy as well:

Like Drafts’ existing twitter features, this update adds the option to post drafts to Facebook. The first time you post you will have to go through an authorization process, allowing Drafts access to your wall – from then on out it’s a simple tap. Those of you that use the Facebook app know, launching it and waiting for it to load to post an update is cumbersome – now you have a quick alternative.

Other improvements in Drafts 1.2 include a new “new draft after success” setting, support for calendar event creation, and integration with OmniFocus notes and Due. These add to the new icon, fixes, and Dropbox support that came in Drafts 1.1.

Drafts is available at $0.99 on the App Store.

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My New Dropbox “Quick Note-Taking” App: Drafts 1.1

In my review of Drafts 1.0, I wrote:

Drafts is neither a text editor nor a minimal Twitter client. Drafts is a frictionless way to capture and save ideas that also happens to be integrated with system functions and applications you may be already using to elaborate on those ideas. Drafts can be used as an inspirational notepad to store the genius idea you have while you’re brewing coffee, or when you’re busy writing something else (just fire up Drafts, and quickly dictate your text if you have an iPhone 4S). I would like to see an even faster way to email text (like Captio or Note 2 Self do) as well as support for Evernote and more text-based iOS apps in a future update, so here’s to hoping the feedback on this initial version will be strong enough to encourage Greg Pierce, the developer of Drafts and Terminology (which the app also supports for definitions), to consider more functionalities and an iPad counterpart.

And from my Dropbox Writing Workflow, about the service I use to save “quick snippets of text” into Dropbox:

I am not always writing long form content. In fact, most of the time I am simply saving ideas and short sentences in Dropbox. The web service I use to quickly get bits of text as .txt files into Dropbox is Send To Dropbox. Using my “Attachments” folder, Send To Dropbox connects via OAuth to my Dropbox account and gives me a unique email address I can email stuff to.

Drafts 1.1, released today, delivers in the two areas I used to find myself dabbling in: quick notes and Dropbox. Aside from a new icon by Wet Frog Studios, some minor UI refinements, and better feedback for executed actions, Drafts 1.1 comes with direct Dropbox integration to let you easily save a draft with one tap into your Dropbox account. Drafts will save notes as timestamped .txt files, meaning that, if you’re clever enough and want to automate your quick note-taking workflow, you could build rules in Hazel to look for specific timestamps and content inside the Apps/Drafts folder in Dropbox.

Personally, Drafts 1.1 fills a particular void in my workflow – a native iPhone app whose sole purpose is to save quick bits of text as single .txt files in Dropbox. With Drafts 1.1 and TextDrop, I can reclaim control of my drafts without being forced to use Send To Dropbox (which still has the obvious advantage of working anywhere). I like how I can type text into Drafts 1.1, hit the Dropbox sharing button, forget about it, and then access my text snippets with TextDrop, iOS file managers like ReaddleDocs and GoodReader (which allow you to directly edit text or “open in” other apps), or my OS X Dropbox folder.

Drafts 1.1, however, doesn’t just bring a few enhancements, bug fixes, and Dropbox support. For instance, third-party app integration has been supercharged with direct support for Sparrow (text will be passed along as email body, and the cursor will be automatically placed in the Subject field), Messages, and Simplenote. Even better, Drafts now lets you configure the apps and actions you want to keep visible in the sharing list with a dedicated menu; installed apps are automatically recognized, whilst supported-but-not-installed ones have a link back to the App Store (the App Store link button could use the same fresh coat of UI paint the icon received). You can enable and disable actions with a double tap.

Typically, 1.1 updates don’t fundamentally change the nature of an app, as they improve on existing features and fix glaring omissions of the first release. For me, Drafts 1.1, with the addition of Dropbox and more stability, feels like an all-new app that now sits in my iPhone dock to quickly save .txt into Dropbox. If you liked the functionalities of Drafts 1.0 and were waiting for more, I highly recommend Drafts 1.1, available on the App Store today at $0.99.

Drafts Review

In the past months, there’s been a surge of “launcher apps” – lightweight utilities that allow iOS users to perform common tasks such as calling someone or starting a FaceTime call without having to use Apple’s apps, and thus their entire interfaces. However, while the concept of launchers and shortcuts has been around for years in the App Store – especially on the quick dial side, apps like Favorites first explored the idea of turning contacts into shortcuts – several of the utilities we have recently reviewed have leveraged the simplicity of such concept to build more powerful solutions to help users save time. With a combination of clever interface designs, new APIs and URL handlers, apps like Launch Center, Buzz, and World Contacts+ are redefining the way users think of interoperability and customization on the iOS platform. App Cubby’s Launch Center has especially gained a well deserved spot in many’s iOS dock thanks to its extensive support for third-party apps and a polished UI.

For the past week, I have been able to use Agile Tortoise’s Drafts, a new iPhone app that’s like “Launch Center for text” – a utility that allows you to save short snippets of text – the drafts – and act on them by sharing them through a number of services or system actions.

Drafts is very simple. Surprisingly so, if you expected to find options to enter custom URL handlers for apps that are capable of accepting text inputs. In fact, my mention of Launch Center is only theoretical, as both utilities share the same underlying ideology – to aggregate a set of actions and supported apps for a specific input into a single interface – but the first version of Drafts doesn’t come with the same amount of customization and tweaks you can find in Launch Center. Still, when it comes to text, Drafts has proved to be an invaluable addition to my workflow that, like Launch Center, got its spot in my iPhone dock.

Drafts saves snippets of text. The app displays a word & character count for these snippets, which can be saved locally and accessed at any time by hitting the drafts icon in the app’s toolbar. Because Drafts 1.0 is iPhone-only, iCloud support hasn’t been added yet – your snippets won’t be synced across devices. You can search for any word across your drafts, and add new ones by simply pressing a + button. In the Settings, you can set the app’s Appearance, choosing between 13 fonts (American Typewriter, Baskerville, Cochin, Courier, Georgia, Gill Sans, Helvetica Neue, Hoefler Text, Marker Felt, Palatino, Times New Roman, Thonbury, and Verdana), three font sizes, and four themes. I chose Grayscale.

You can use Drafts as a notepad, a scratchpad of sorts, or a draft manager for your tweets, much like the defunct Birdhouse used to. Drafts sports a nice integration with Twitter, enabling you tweet natively using iOS’ support for Twitter, and letting you directly forward text to Tweetbot or the official Twitter app. If you choose to send text to these apps, the compose screen will open with the text already pasted, and you will just have to hit Send to publish a new tweet. I suspect support for more Twitter apps is coming in a future update.

Drafts isn’t just about Twitter, though. You can pick a draft, and email it to someone using the native iOS mail framework. You can copy a draft to the system clipboard, or, if you like to write in Markdown, preview the formatting, copy the Markdown to your clipboard, or email it. Being a huge fan of Markdown (which I use on a daily basis for my writing on MacStories), this is a nice addition.

Drafts is neither a text editor nor a minimal Twitter client. Drafts is a frictionless way to capture and save ideas that also happens to be integrated with system functions and applications you may be already using to elaborate on those ideas. Drafts can be used as an inspirational notepad to store the genius idea you have while you’re brewing coffee, or when you’re busy writing something else (just fire up Drafts, and quickly dictate your text if you have an iPhone 4S). I would like to see an even faster way to email text (like Captio or Note 2 Self do) as well as support for Evernote and more text-based iOS apps in a future update, so here’s to hoping the feedback on this initial version will be strong enough to encourage Greg Pierce, the developer of Drafts and Terminology (which the app also supports for definitions), to consider more functionalities and an iPad counterpart. In this first version, Drafts supports TextExpander touch, but there is no option to forward text to Apple’s Messages app.

Drafts 1.0 is a very good start, especially if you’ve been looking for a standalone draft manager for Twitter. You can get the app at $0.99 on the App Store.