We are a little closer to instantaneous thought sharing with Drafts, an ingenious app for iPhone and iPad that lets you write ideas, appointments, emails, notes—willy-nilly, in a single, clean message space and then select the destination app it is targeted for, either after writing or at some later time. Click a button to send directly to email, Facebook, Twitter, Calendar, Evernote, Dropbox, or to export text to any app that handles text files. You also have the opportunity to create formatted email or other content with Markdown, a structured markup language, and you can preview its HTML output.
For those of you with a serious goal to improve productivity, look to the combination of Drafts and IFTTT (If This Then That): a workflow customization and rules service that allows you to automate an action that depends on a “trigger,” so you can, for instance, use IFTTT to automatically post to a social media platform any email authored in Drafts that was sent to a specific recipient, or with keywords in the subject.
I like using Drafts on my iPad to capture thoughts and notes without worrying about their final disposition. … A thought begins to appear, I click over to Drafts and start typing in its lovely clean space. I can decide at the end what app (or apps) to send it to with a single click, or I can stack up thoughts in a virtual pile of notes that is searchable and in chronological order, saving them to deal with later. A bonus is the character counter: I never need to wonder whether 140 characters have been written (and I simply click to send the composition to Twitter).
If your material has links, or contact information, you can click on the “Link mode” to make that material active and clickable, right in the message space. This mode is very handy for converting “dead” text to active links; I sometimes paste blocks of contact or web addresses into Drafts for quick access to clickable links. Agile Tortoise, the maker of Drafts, also makes the Terminology app, which works with Drafts to provide a set of dictionary features if you have both apps (I didn’t have Terminology to test their coordination).
Drafts is a great pipeline for organization and communication—its simplicity bypasses the inertia that blocks a message or a jot at its inception, going immediately to a productive endpoint. Drafts subdues the resistance to the commitment and structure of opening an email or calendar and typing all those fields, or finding just the right app and jumping through its hoops. One caution is that Drafts, in the hands of your offspring, could allow them to send material to the target apps, since it is so easy to export or send a post with a simple click. Drafts is available from Agile Tortoise in the App Store for $2.99/iPhone and $3.99/iPad.
I received a copy of Drafts for iPad for review and did not review Drafts for iPhone.
