Drafts: the writing app for iPhone

I have previously heard a lot about a writing app for iPhone called Drafts but never took a look until recently because I have always used Ulysses for my writing. With my Ulysses coming up for renewal and Drafts been half the price with what appears to be more functions I through I would take a look.

Drafts bills itself as where text starts and I see what they mean after only a few hours of use the actions for sending your text to different apps on your phone are really powerful. What Drafts doesn’t say is how good it is at writing blog posts and long form text on iPhone and iPad.

As I have discussed before a lot of my blog posts start out being tapped out on my iPhone or iPad sitting on the sofa before being polished up and published when at my computer. Previously I had a great workflow for this in Ulysses, this workflow has transitioned seamlessly to Drafts.

What’s more I am using Drafts for a lot more than writing blog posts and long form content. Drafts really is where text starts and earned it’s place on my iPhone Home Screen, iPad dock and Mac dock in less than a week. Let me explain just some of the things I am using Drafts for:

Writing emails on the go

With support for Markdown and combined with the action list Drafts is the perfect app to not only start but finish writing and send long form emails from your iPhone. Before Drafts I have always delayed writing long emails on my phone and always waited until I am at a computer or have my keyboard case on the iPad. Now I have no problems talking out long emails on my phone and don’t think twice.

While I could have done this in Ulysses and copied and pasted the text to email, this is simply something I never thought of until I saw the action on Drafts for this. Now this is something I do all the time.

Writing lists

Another powerful action in Drafts has led to me writing lists in Drafts. Send to Things, my task manager of choice, allows me to write a long list of tasks with continuous thought faster than I can in the Things 3 app. The action then sends my list to Things 3 in just a tap.

Previously I would create a project on Things 3 on my phone and wait until I got to a computer to populate the project with tasks. Drafts has changed this whole process for me and allows me to get more things out of my head wherever I am.

Meeting notes

Drafts support for Markdown and its actions menu mean I am now writing my notes in Drafts during meetings and quickly sending them over to Apple Notes my go to note taking app for long term storage. The biggest difference here is how fast Drafts opens and it opens directly to a blank document ready for typing. This allows me to get to write a new note straight away and later process the notes and clean them up before sending them to Apple Notes for long term storage.

There are only 2 reasons Drafts can not completely replace Apple Notes for me, Drafts does not support attachments and Drafts can’t replace quick note on the iPad.

Writing blog posts

As mentioned above I have started writing blog posts in Drafts instead of Ulysses. This is because it supports Markdown just like Ulysses and has a distraction free writing experience. But the other advantages I have learnt from Drafts is the arrange mode. Yes Drafts can move full sections, paragraphs and sentences around in a document with just a few taps. This is incredibly powerful when writing a longer blog post.

In addition Drafts has an action for posting directly to WordPress just like Ulysses does.

Long form content

This is one area where I have to admit Ulysses is better because of the way you can split and combine sheets to better organise a long document. Drafts can handle long documents and does so very well, however, a long document if Drafts is exactly that a single long document.

2,000 and 3,000 word instruction manuals don’t work so well in drafts but for the price and in the interest of only having one subscription to a writing app I have been using Drafts for writing my clients website owners manuals recently.

Conclusion

I have not even scratched the surface of this insanely powerful writing app and will be doing a few deep drive blog posts on this in the coming weeks and months.

Some other features I am using daily but want to cover in more detail in future posts are

• Text Expander support on iPhone
• Tags and Workspaces
• Custom actions
• Writing code
• Templates
• Apple Watch app

Over the coming months I will cover each of these in more detail as part of separate deep drive posts.

It is safe to say Drafts has become my go to writing application and really is where text starts.