I’ve written about my text editors of choice before, and while I still use Byword and Scrivener for their respective strengths, there is one app I use that is by far the most indispensable.
And that app is Drafts by Agile Tortoise for the iPhone and iPad.
Today the app saw another great update, and even before that it was my go–to app for all of my initial capturing. That’s the main thrust of what I use Drafts for: to capture my ideas quickly and have a means to get them where they need to be in as frictionless a manner as possible. Drafts lets me do that….and a whole lot more.
Drafts replaces so many other apps on my iOS devices, so much so that it really isn’t funny. It does Markdown preview, it sends stuff to OmniFocus (along with Things, The Hit List, and Clear), it sends posts to Byword (among other text editors), it sends quotes to Quotebook, and it conducts email (and now URL) actions that speed up processes for me like nothing else. And that’s just for starters.
In fact, Drafts does so much that it reminds me a lot of OmniFocus and Evernote. It can be used for so little if you want, but can also be used for so much more should you need it. It is staggeringly powerful, and if you have an iOS device1 and you want to get writing — and a lot more — done more efficiently and effectively over the long haul, then spend some time with Drafts. It is worth every minute you spend with it…and every penny that it costs (which is only $2.99).
I’ll be sure to dive deeper into Drafts in future posts, such as how I use it and where it fits into various workflows. For now, I’ll just let you in on something: I wrote the idea for this post in Drafts, sent it to Byword from Drafts, and then sent it to Poster via the clipboard so I could post it here. And I could have written this post in Drafts and sent it to Poster2 just as easily.
Drafts is simply the most versatile app on my iPad (where I write a great deal from) and iPhone (where I store many of my captured stuff), which makes it one of the most powerful as well.
1 The new update even works on the original iPad. Unreal.
2 This is the first iOS app I’m actually able to trust with my blog posts. Still am only savign them to drafts there, but getting closer to pulling the “publish” trigger.
