The popular capture and writing tool for IOS Drafts now supports DTTG (DEVONthink) directly. This is great news for us IOS writers. Drafts can be used as a wonderful environment both to capture ideas, stuff etc, write an outline in free form text or begin or fully write a document and send it off to a variety of applications for either further processing or just plain use as is.
Drafts presents you with a piece of basic white paper in which you simply write. Unlike DTTG, it presents text in a clear fashion and is very well suited to the simple act of writing plus the added benefit of capturing information. These documents, by using the Send to Devonthink function in Drafts automatically places the new document in the universal inbox of DTTG. From there, you could either further process it in DTTG if need be or sync it to DEVONTHINK on the desktop and do any other processing there such as adding tags and placing it in an appropriate folder. Then sync back to DTTG.
Another wonderful aspect of Drafts is that it supports Markdown. If you write say an e-mail in Drafts and use Markdown to stylize the text (bold, italics etc) you can send this off to mail as a Markdown to Mail document and voila you have a nicely formatted document in mail. You can also send the exact same text file to any other supported application thus reducing the steps of copy and pasting it around all over the place. Just remember about DTTG that if you do write your Drafts document with Markdown coding it won’t be seen in DTTG or DEVONthink. Even if you convert your Drafts text document in DEVONthink to Rich Text or HTML you still will not see this properly formatted. Its unfortunate but Markdown syntax is so straightforward it won’t take away from the reading of your document.
I would highly recommend that you start all DTTG notes in Drafts to have a much better writing experience. You’ll really enjoy it and you can easily send that text off to any number of environments so it is extremely reusable at the click of a mouse. Finally, Drafts is very flexible and you can set when you want a new page to appear. If you set it for 30 seconds and are gone from Drafts for more than that, say to process your text in DEVONthink, when you return to Drafts you’ll be presented with a fresh page to just start typing away in. This is a highly frictionless environment. To get your previous Drafts back is a simple click of the small, almost transparent Paper Notes icon and then all the documents you’ve worked on are listed. Its very simple to also delete your documents from this list via a swipe to the left on it.
Finally, Drafts syncs amongst all IOS devices almost instantaneously using the Siperium network.
The only downside to Drafts, at least from my perspective, is that it is IOS only. I’d love it to run natively in OSX however, that’s not in the works. Regardless, you’ll love using Drafts in conjunction with DTTG specifically and any of a number of other environments.