Hands on with Drafts 3.0 and its impressive new organization tools
Drafts, the hugely popular iOS app for making quick text bits and notes, and then repurposing them in all kinds of ways, hit version 3.0 on Wednesday. The new version adds better organization options for drafts and actions, new action options, Reminders integration, and more.
At its core, Drafts () is focused on launching quickly and letting you instantly tap out notes on your iPad or iPhone. The drafts you create are saved automatically, but the real appeal of the app is that you can then act on your text or send it to other apps. Developer Agile Tortoise has been regularly adding all sorts of actions: Whereas the initial version of the app offered just a few, Drafts 3.0 packs in dozens. For example, you can publish drafts to Twitter, App.net, or Facebook; turn them into calendar entries (including optional Fantastical connectivity); save them as Reminders; send them to Evernote; push them to Dropbox; and plenty more.
The new organization options let you split actions into tabbed groups for easier access.
In fact, the Drafts actions list has grown so long that for some people, the most welcome feature in Drafts 3.0 is a new option for organizing actions. In the Manage Actions section of the app’s settings, you can now organize actions into four tabs (labeled |, ||, |||, and ||||); you also, as always, hide unused actions. Although the organization itself feels a bit clunky—you tap a task, choose which pane it should belong to, and tweak what should happen afterwards—it’s one of those set-it-and-forget-it processes: Once you’ve crafted the perfect action-pane setup for yourself, you never need to revisit that section of the settings.
For example, since I don’t use Evernote or Markdown, I hid actions related to those services. (It’s easy to restore hidden actions from the Hidden tab.) I ended up organizing my tabs with the first pane being for sharing drafts on social services, the second for integrations with built-in apps (Messages, Mail, Calendar, Reminders), the third for core iOS actions (Open In, Copy, Print), and the fourth for third-party integrations (Dropbox, Fantastical, and the like). This new organizational takes accessing actions from tedious to awesome.
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