The newly updated
Drafts is just one of those applications that is a pleasure to use. It is an app for writing the occasional note or jotting down the odd little thought yet you'll find you use it constantly and you will write long pieces in it. Go get it now, would you?
We wouldn't recommend that you write your novel in it. Drafts is not going to replace
Scrivener but it's not intended to. It's intended to be this quiet little app that just opens quickly, lets you start typing immediately, and then gets out of your way.
Buy Drafts and pop it on the homescreen of your iOS devices. Then whenever you need to make any kind of note or write any type of text, tap on it and begin writing. We've done shopping lists in it, we've taken down people's phone numbers and directions to cafés, we've popped in great titles for books we vow we'll write one day. Speaking of which, Drafts is also the app we turn to in the middle of the night when we've dreamt a great plot and have to get it down before we fully wake up.
If that's all you do with it, fine. Apart from the speed of its opening and of how you go straight to typing instead of having to press a button to create a new note, you could easily argue that Drafts is the same as any other note-taking app. We do just find it a terribly comfortable place to write in. That's so hard to quantify but equally it's really hard to ignore.
What we can readily quantify, though, is that Drafts may act like this quiet little app but it has power just waiting for when you need it. The real reason we turn to Drafts in the middle of the night is because once we've written that brilliant thought down, we can tap a button and fall back asleep knowing that Drafts is saving the thought to our Evernote Ideas notebook.
Drafts is about getting text in and then, if you want, doing something with it. Send that text straight out to someone as an iMessage or an email. Save it straight from Drafts into OmniFocus. Append the text to an Evernote note. Drafts comes with a set of Actions and you can install more for free from its website where other users are finding new ways to exploit Drafts' capabilities.
You can get deliciously detailed. There's one thing we do where we need quite a bit of information from various websites and it used to mean copying the URL, pasting it somewhere, copying the title, pasting, copying this and that and the other. Now we just go to the site, select a bit of text we want and use the Drafts Sharing extension. It copies all of the elements we want, arranges them all in the sequence we want and adds in extra standard lines of text we often add. Then with one tap we're sending that text from the site straight into Drafts where we can work on it more.
We do end up with a lot of notes in Drafts. One of the new features in version 4.1 is that you are now able to select several notes and have Drafts compile them into one. There are also new features for using Drafts alongside Launch Centre Pro if you use that and it has fixes to do with syncing over iCloud.
However, it's really the core of Drafts 4 that make us recommend this app rather than the nice and useful additions in version 4.1. Make no mistake, though: we really recommend Drafts. We've sometimes had issues where something we've set up on the iPad version hasn't copied over to the iPhone one and while in truth we blame ourselves there, it'd be good to be clearer on how that's done. Nonetheless, our only real criticism is that this is solely an iOS app and if there were a Mac one, we'd buy it in a heartbeat.
Drafts 4.1 is a universal app that requires iOS 8.0 or higher and
costs $10 on the App Store.
Who is Drafts 4.1 for:
If you need to make fast notes, if you want to write text and then worry about what to do with it later, if you just want to enjoy writing in an app, then Drafts is for you.
Who is Drafts 4.1 not for:
Novelists won't find the kind of tools they need for long-form work in here: Drafts is intentionally a short note-taking app, even if we bend that and write thousands of words in it.
-William Gallagher (
@WGallagher)
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