by If you’ve got an iOS device, you probably compose text in a slew of different apps: email in an email client, tweets in a Twitter client, tasks in a to-do-list manager, ideas for articles in a text editor…and on and on. But sometimes I want to write something—or at least the idea for something—before I even know where it’s going, and I want to keep those notes and ideas handy for when I’m ready to do something with them. (Other times I start writing in one app and later decide to finish in another.)
It’s easy enough to cut and paste text between apps, but these days, much of my iOS-composed text starts out in the aptly named Drafts, a stellar app from Agile Tortoise. Available for both the iPad ($4) and the iPhone ($3), Drafts is a catch-all bucket for typing messages, jotting down ideas, storing templates, and—just as useful—doing things with that text when it’s ready.
Launch Drafts, and you can start typing right away—there’s no need to create a new document, think of a title, or leap any other hurdles to getting your thoughts out of your head and into the app. The iPhone version of Drafts offers a clean document view with just a few buttons and the onscreen keyboard; the iPad version adds an additional row of keys above the onscreen keyboard that are useful for formatting links and typing frequently used symbols (including common Markdown and MultiMarkdown notation characters). Unlike the special keys found in many other iOS text editors, Drafts’s remain on the screen when you use an external Bluetooth keyboard.
To start a new draft while in the app, tap the the plus-sign (+) button; whatever draft you were previously working on is automatically saved. Tap the documents button (an icon of a piece of paper) to view a list of all your saved drafts. The first few words of each draft are displayed in the list to make it easier to find a particular one; you can also use the search feature by tapping the magnifying-glass button and typing a search query.
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