Drafts — Writing Made Easy

by admin

July 13, 2024

You may wonder why anyone would need to write on an iPhone or iPad, especially since typing on the touch screen is excruciating. But when you’re on the go, sometimes inspiration strikes, laptops die or you just have to write done right then and there.

The default Notes app is adequate, but let’s face it — it’s limited. Drafts is a more Apple-like solution, combining powerful features with a simple interface, so you can easily write on a mobile device.

What’s the App?

Drafts, offered by Agile Tortoise for $2 for iPhone and $3 for iPad, lets you jot down notes, write drafts and otherwise scribble down ideas and whims on your mobile devices. On first impression, you’ll notice the clean, no-frills interface — it starts with a blank screen, features a keyboard, and offers series of small buttons to create notes or see a list of older drafts — and little else. There’s not even a save button — like Google Docs, it frequently and automatically saves your work for you.

The most useful part is how easy it is to just begin typing — you don’t have to name and title a piece to save your work, for instance. You can just follow your inspiration. Nice touches like automatic word count are useful when writing tweets as well, boosting the versatility in content creation.

The really powerful thing about Drafts is how nicely it plays with content-management software, apps and services ranging from Twitter to Evernote to Dropbox, not to mention OmniFocus and Sparrow. You can also whip up an outline, for example, and share it easily with your team via Evernote or Dropbox.

You’ll Want It If…

You’re any kind of content creator — writer, journalist or rabid Twitter guru — and you need a notes solution on hand. It’s not really a word processing solution for longer documents — unless you’re perhaps using the iPad with a keyboard dock — but it’s a valuable first or even second step in the process of longer-form writing. It’ll help you capture and share notes, outlines and rough drafts on the move before switching to a more robust word processor.

It’s Not My Thing — What Else Ya Got?

The drawback of Drafts is its look-and-feel. The interface may be a bit too simple. If you stare at the screen for longer periods of time, the brightness and lack of contrast may strain eyes. It comes with a few options to switch up layouts and visuals, including a “night” mode, but overall it’s not very flexible with customization. The lack of visual pizzazz extends to the documents themselves — outside of a few fonts, there aren’t many options to play around with.

If you like a little more control over the look-and-feel — and work on an iPad — Notability is an excellent, robust note-capture app. Not only can you work in text, you can save audio notes, annotate PDFs and do a multitude of powerful tasks. The word processing features are more advanced too, and the ability to create a library of work gives it an advantage when it comes to organizing by project, subject or other criteria.

But there’s no iCloud integration, which is a big minus, and other apps don’t integrate as well. But if you’re on iPad, you may prefer Notability over Drafts, and at $1, it’s a cheaper option for the impressive amount of features you get.