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- [Mike] Hi, this is Mike Schmitz
and welcome to another edition of ScreenCastsOnline.
In this episode we'll be taking a look
at Drafts for iOS.
Drafts is an interesting application that is hard to define
but in a nutshell it's the place where text starts
on your iOS devices.
Now why does that matter?
Well, iOS isn't great for manipulating text
between different applications.
So Drafts aims to be the starting place for text
on your iOS devices.
On the application website,
it says that Drafts lets you turn text into action.
It's a quick notebook, handy editor
and a writing automation tool all in one.
That's a pretty fair and accurate description in my opinion.
You're not going to do long form writing and Drafts
but it's a great place to capture things
when you think of them.
So in this episode we're going to show you
the major benefits of starting text in Drafts
and what you can do with it once it's there.
Now Drafts for iOS is a universal app
which means you can run it on your iPhone and your iPad.
The interface is laid out exactly the same on both devices.
The iPad just gives you a bigger canvas
but because a major benefit of Drafts
is that it allows you to quickly capture text
and the iPhone is typically the device
that you will have with you at any moment,
we're going to be using the iPhone version
for the actual screencast to mimic real world usage.
Before we begin though, I want to ask you
to give Drafts a fair shake.
It's easy to write it off
as an application you don't really need
and I did this for quite a while myself
but I can tell you from my experience
that Drafts has evolved
into one of the most used applications on my iPhone.
The plain text formatting offers several advantages
over something like Apple notes but if you're like me,
you won't realise just how much you get annoyed
by trying to manipulate text on iOS
until you really start using an application
like Drafts for a little while.
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To get started with Drafts you first need to download it
from the iOS app store.
Drafts is free to download but there is a pro version
which offers several additional more advanced features.
We're gonna dig into a lot of these
but out of the box Drafts can do quite a bit.
You can see what's available with the pro version of Drafts
at the Drafts website.
Basically what it gives you is the ability to create
and edit actions which we'll take a look at in a little bit,
the ability to customise the themes and icons
which we're going to show you how to do.
It gives you workspaces which allow you
to store your tag query and sort settings
and it gives you enhanced URL automation
by giving you access to some very powerful URL schemes
which is honestly a bit beyond the scope of this tutorial
and less important with this version of Drafts in my opinion
because Drafts version five gives you the ability
to customise actions without having to know
all of the x-callback URL schemes.
So a lot of the things
that you needed to hard-code previously
by using these URL schemes,
are now possible with visual tools
built into Drafts or other applications
that integrate with Drafts like workflow.
I'll try to call out the pro features as we go
throughout this tutorial
but now let's go over to our iOS device
and take a look at the Drafts interface and how it works.
and that's really all I need to do
with this thing right now.
I can go back to what I was doing,
I can come back later in the day when I have another idea
and when I open up Drafts again
it's gonna give me a blank slate to write down the idea
that I don't want to forget about.
Now you can configure how long Drafts waits
before presenting you a new draught.
So if you set it to 60 seconds for example
and you jotted something down when you opened up Drafts
30 seconds later, it would still have
the note that you just captured
but you can configure that in the settings
and we'll show you how to do that in a little bit.
Another thing I really enjoy about Drafts
is that it supports markdown.
It's actually a pretty powerful markdown text editor
so if I wanted to emphasise a particular word,
like can't I could use markdown formatting
and put two asterisks on either side of the word
which is going to tell Drafts that this is a word
that should show up in bold and I can apply that formatting
either manually like I did here
or Drafts offers a markdown keyboard.
So if I tap on the circle icon
in the keyboard row right here,
I can select the markdown keyboard
and now I've got common markdown elements that I can apply
by tapping on them rather than typing in the code.
There's another button here for lists.
So I could use markdown formatting to create a list.
In fact let's do that right now.
Let's make this a list of things I can't forget
and I'm just going to make a quick list here.
This is not markdown format
but I'm going to select all of this text,
hit the button on the markdown keyboard
to create a bulleted list
and it's going to apply the formatting
to create bullets of all the text that I have highlighted.
So Drafts could actually be a very quick way
to learn markdown as well
if you're not familiar with the markdown formatting
because you can just use this markdown keyboard
to apply the formatting for you
and then after you do it a couple times,
you can start to see what it's doing
and then use that yourself
whenever you wanted to use markdown
in another markdown capable application,
like day one or deck set.
So now we've got some markdown formatted text.
Now we can preview what this looks like
without the formatting and we can do that
straight from the markdown enabled keyboard here.
If I scroll to the right side of this keyboard,
you can see there is a preview button.
When we tap on the preview button,
we get a preview of the markdown formatting
and this is what it would look like
if we exported this markdown formatted text
into something like HTML
which is something that is possible within Drafts.
For now I'm just going to tap continue and close the preview
and now let's actually do something with this text.
So I mentioned the preview showed us what it would look like
if we formatted this into HTML,
which is possible with the actions
but we're not going to start there.
We're going to start with some more basic actions
but this is the second thing that Drafts is really good at.
So in addition to giving you a quick place to capture text,
it makes it very easy to do something with that text
when you get around to processing this later
and you can do that with several of the built-in actions
or you can create your own actions
which as we mentioned at the very beginning
is a pro feature
but you can access any of the built-in actions
simply by tapping the Drafts icon
in the upper right of the toolbar
and that's going to open up in this case, the basic group.
These are the actions that are built into Drafts.
So these are the ones that you get with the free version
and there's a lot of stuff here
that you would have had to build manually
in previous versions of Drafts.
Like save the Dropbox and we're going to take a look
at some of these that are built into Drafts
and show you what you can do
without even paying for the application.
So first let's take a look at how we could copy this text.
Okay and this is very simple
but we can take any of the text that is in Drafts,
copy it and paste it into another application.
So if I went into my Notes app,
I could paste all of the text from this particular draught
and this maybe isn't such a big deal
because I don't have a lot of text here
but if I had a paragraphs worth of text
and I didn't want to have to select it all and copy it,
I could use that action to select all the text
and it makes it a lot easier
rather than trying to manipulate the iOS style popup menu
that appears whenever you try to select text.
So that's one very basic action
but that's really just the tip of the iceberg.
So let's go back into Drafts now
and again because of the way Drafts is designed,
it's not going to take me back to the old draught
that I was looking at.
It's going to assume by design of the application
that I want to record something new
and it's going to give me a blank draught.
I'm gonna jot down a real quick message here
and this time let's send this as a message
in the messages app.
So again once we've composed our message,
we tap the Drafts icon in the right side of the toolbar.
That's going to open up the basic group
and show us all the actions we have available.
I'm going to select the message action
and now Drafts is going to take that text
and put it into a new message
and then I can select who I want to send this to.
Let's send this to Don and then
I can just tap the blue up arrow to send the message
and I could obviously send it to multiple people
if I wanted to but the advantage here
is that I can get my message just the way I want it
and then I can send it and if I decide
in the process of creating this message
that it really shouldn't be a message,
it should be an email something like that,
then it's very easy to send it someplace else instead.
So I'm actually going to cancel this message
and I'm going to send this as an email instead
but these actions allow you to do more
than just copy the text and put it into one specific field.
So for the email one for example,
I could have the first line of the draught
be the subject line.
So maybe I want to put something like check out Drafts,
that's going to appear in the subject line now
when I tap on the mail message.
Okay and again by tapping on the appropriate action,
it opens it in the correct application
and all I've got to do is fill out the person's name
that I want to send this particular message to.
Now I don't really want to send this message,
so I'm going to cancel that
and you can see in the messages example
and the email example
where I didn't follow through with the action,
I am going to get a red confirmation notification
which is going to tell me that the action
didn't really go through instead of the green one
that we got when we copied it.
Let's take a look at another built in action.
This time let's do a Google search.
So we can use Drafts as the place to capture an idea.
Maybe I want to explore Drafts actions,
okay and I'm out for a walk I jot that down into Drafts,
when I come back later I have some time,
I want to see what's available on the World Wide Web,
so I'm going to go to that draught,
I'll tap on the Drafts icon
in the upper right section of the toolbar
and then I'll tap on Google search
and that will do a Google search
for the term that is in my Drafts
and we can see here that there's a whole action directory
devoted to actions for Drafts.
Now again this is a pro feature if you wanted to add these
but this is great news because it means that
there's a whole bunch of actions
that people have already created,
that I can instal with a single tap.
I don't have to build them from scratch.
Just about anything that I might want to do,
somebody has probably figured out already.
We're going to take a look at how to instal those
in a little bit but let's go back to Drafts.
Let's look at another built in action.
I really like Drafts
and I want the whole world to know about it
so I'm going to create a draught
that says I love Drafts and then I'm going to tap
on that Drafts icon in the tool bar
and I'm going to share this message via social media.
So I'm going to tap on the Twitter button.
Now the first time I launch this is going to tell me
that authorization is needed so I'll tap continue.
I'll authorise the app
and then it's going to open it in Drafts
and because of the authorization that's required at first
is going to show the red error message,
but then you'll see
it's going to turn to green pretty quickly
and I've now posted a tweet from Drafts.
In fact let's go look at our Twitter application,
in my case I like Twitterific.
All right so I'm going to tap on my profile here
and then tap on tweets
and there's the tweet that I posted from Drafts
just a little bit ago.
Let's look at another default action in Drafts.
This time let's add something to our task manager
so we could save this to a list in reminders
but what I want to show you is how to create tasks
inside of things or OmniFocus.
This is one of the ways that I use Drafts the most.
I really like the ability
to just jot things down into Drafts
and then make a judgement call
about where things are supposed to go.
Oftentimes I'll jot things down and I'll think it's a task
but maybe it's not really a task or vice-versa
and I found previously
that by just capturing things straight into my task manager,
sometimes I would find things in there
that really weren't appropriate
but when I put them in Drafts first then I can decide
whether they should go to something like a task manager
or maybe it's just reference material and in that case
maybe it's better suited for Dropbox or Evernote.
So I use these types of actions all the time
and built-in you can send your Drafts
to things or OmniFocus.
So maybe I want to create a task of signing up
for the pro version because I want
some of those awesome additional features.
Then when I tap the Drafts icon in the upper right again,
I tap on the task in things,
Drafts will say it wants to open things
and then things will open
and the task goes straight to my inbox.
So now I have a task in things with the text
from the draught itself and I can do the same thing
if I wanted to send the draught to OmniFocus.
So in this case I'll tap the action task and OmniFocus,
Drafts will open OmniFocus
and it'll give me a new inbox item
and it will give me the ability
to add any additional information that I want to this task
like tags in the new version of OmniFocus,
a project, a flag, a due date, notifications
and then when I'm done with this,
I just tap the Save button in the upper right.
Now I go into my inbox and you can see
I've got a task right there for signing up for pro.
You can also send Drafts to Day One,
one of my favourite journaling applications.
So maybe you wanted to jot down something into Drafts,
you're not sure it's going to be a journal entry
but when processing your Drafts inbox
you take a look at this you decide yep,
this does qualify as a journal entry
and I want to send this to Day One
so that I can keep it in the appropriate place.
Again we just tap the Drafts icon
and then we tap the Day One button,
Drafts will open Day One because I have face ID,
it's going to verify me
and then it's gonna paste my text
into a brand new journal entry
and this is where the mark down formatting
really could help because Day One also supports markdown.
So any markdown formatting that I've applied in Drafts
as I captured things would transfer
over to my day one journal entry as well
and once I add the text here,
I can add additional text before I would save this
so maybe in Drafts I'm questioning
whether this is supposed to be a journal entry
when I get here I decide that it is
so I can add additional text
before I tap the check mark button
and save this in my Day One journal.
So hopefully you're starting to see that you can do
quite a bit with text and Drafts
just with the free version
because we haven't touched any of the pro features yet.
We'll come back to these actions in a little bit
but for now let's go back to the Drafts interface
and show you how you can make your store Drafts.
So if I swipe from the left side of the screen to the right,
it's gonna open up a drawer like interface
and it's going to give me all of the Drafts
that I have written in the application
and they're going to be broken down
into a couple different categories.
So I've got the inbox which is the default place
where things get stored and from here,
I can take action on any one of these Drafts
by swiping on that particular draught from right to left.
So this one at the bottom here,
something I don't want to forget.
Maybe I decide that this really isn't that important.
I'm gonna trash this particular draught.
A list of things I can't forget again,
maybe I don't want to keep this around.
Maybe I want to archive this
and this one up here sign up for pro,
this is something that I want to remember.
So maybe I want to flag this particular draught.
When I flag a draught you can see
it gives that draught a little orange circle
in the lower left corner of that particular Drafts row.
But I can also see all of my flag Drafts
simply by tapping on the flagged button.
So tapping on flagged, shows me I just have
that one flag draught.
If I go over and tap on the archive button,
I can see all of the different Drafts
that I've captured over the years and I have archived
and I can see all of the Drafts that I've deleted
by tapping on the trash icon.
Let's go back to the inbox and let's take a look
at some of the other buttons that are in this interface.
There's a filters button which allows me to filter
the types of things that I see here.
Now the ability to use these and save these is a pro feature
but let me just show you real quickly how this works.
So in the filters here I can select
which tags I want to show up.
I can show which tags I want to omit
and I can add specific things to my filter.
Now I don't have any tags applied to any of my Drafts
so we'll come back to this in just a second.
Let's go back to our draught itself
and look at the other buttons
that are available in this interface.
Since we're talking about tags,
let's tap the tag button which is kind in the middle.
It's on the right side of those lists of four icons
on the left in the toolbar
and that's going to create another row below that
and it's gonna allow me to add a tag.
I can just type in the tag that I want to apply,
hit the return key on the software keyboard
and the tag is going to be applied.
Now you also see that there's a flag on the left hand side
and that is because a flag basically acts as a tag
inside of Drafts
so if I wanted to flag this particular draught,
I could tap that flag and the flag is going to turn
from an outline icon into an orange flag
and you can apply as many tags like this as you'd like.
Now let's tap the tag icon again to close this
and let's take a look at some of the details.
So if we tap on the info button,
we're going to get the details for this particular draught.
So we've got the draught itself and in this case
the 24 C at the beginning what that's showing
is the unique identifier for this draught.
So I can tap the link that says copy link to draught
and it's going to grab the URL for this specific draught
and then I could paste that URL anywhere else
in any other application in iOS
and what that would give me
is the ability to when I tap on that link
in a different application whether it be another writing app
or a task manager, that link is going to tell iOS
to open up the Drafts app and take me directly
to this particular draught.
So it can be handy
when you want to refer back to these Drafts.
There's also the action log which shows you
all of the actions that you have taken
on this particular draught and we can see from this
that there was one action performed,
completed today at 3:50 p.m.
If we tap on that it's going to show us
all the actions that were executed.
It's going to show us a number of versions of this draught
so if we wanted to revert to a previous version,
we could do that.
It's going to show us when it was created
and when it was modified.
Now let's go back to this link to a specific draught.
I want to give you an example of this.
Let's tap that link to copy the link to the draught
and then let's leave Drafts and go into the Day One entry
that was created when we took action
on this particular draught.
Let's edit this specific journal entry
and let's paste that URL so we can see what it looks like.
Okay so you can see this URL scheme, this is telling iOS
that is going to open up the application Drafts V
and it's going to open a specific UUID,
that is the unique identifier for that particular draught.
So when I save this, I've got a tappable link
and when I tap on this,
it's going to take me straight to that particular draught
regardless of where I left off.
So even if I was in a different draught previously
where I haven't used Drafts in days,
it's going to take me straight here.
All right again let's go back
to that list of Drafts that we have,
swipe from the left side of the screen
and we've got two Drafts now that are flagged.
So we got two orange circles
and let's take a look at these filters again.
So now that we've applied a tag and not just a flag
to our journal entry, let's use that
to show you how these filters work.
I'm just going to tap on the journal tag
to add that to the filter and behind that
maybe you can see that but what it did
is it filtered all of the Drafts and only is showing me now
the Drafts that fit the criteria
that I've outlined right here.
So it's only going to show me
the Drafts that have a journal tag
and let's get this window out of the way
so we can see this.
If I go back to my Inbox now,
you can see the filter is turned on
because the filter icon is filled.
It's now blue, it's showing me the tag that's applied
and it's showing me only the results from this custom search
that fit that criteria of having that journal tag applied.
So this can be a really powerful feature
as you get hundreds or even thousands of Drafts
in your database because they're all plain text,
they're not going to take up a lot of room
but the filters will allow you to search through
and find things that you want
no matter how many Drafts you have in the application.
All right I'm going to go clear this filter
and I'm going to go back and select any.
Let's go back to our inbox here,
let's look at some of the other features that are available
in this particular interface.
So we look at the filters, that's how we can apply tags
but maybe we just want to search for something quickly.
We can use the magnifying glass icon right here
to type in a search term.
So if I wanted to search for all of the Drafts
that use the word Pro I could type the word Pro,
it's gonna filter it in real-time
and only show me the Drafts in my inbox
because that's the folder that I've selected
that have the word Pro.
All right let's clear that search term.
There's a couple more buttons at the bottom of the screen,
the plus icon is what we would use to add a new draught.
We can take action on multiple Drafts
by tapping the select button.
When we do that we've got checkboxes
which are going to appear,
so we could check however many Drafts
we want to take action on.
Once we have the Drafts selected
that we want to take action on, we tap the operations button
and it's going to provide us several actions.
So if we wanted to add or remove tags
to multiple Drafts at a time we could do that.
If we wanted to move things to a particular folder
like the inbox, the archive folder
if we wanted to flag or unflag Drafts we could do that.
We can even run a specific action on multiple Drafts.
We could merge the Drafts so we could combine them all.
We could export them to send them somewhere else
or we could delete them and move them all to the trash.
In our case we're done with these for now
so I'm just going to put them in the archive folder.
There's a couple other tools that Drafts gives you
for longer blocks of text.
So let's create a longer message
and then take a look at some of those.
Okay so here is a message that has four different paragraphs
and I want to show you a couple things
that we can do here with this.
So first of all we could focus on this particular draught
and that's handy
when you are creating something more lengthy like this
because it allows you to keep adding things
to the same draught instead of being presented
with a new draught every time you open the application.
So Drafts provides what's called a focus mode
which is going to stay on this particular draught
for as long as the focus mode is applied.
We can tap the button in the lower left,
the eyeball icon is going to fill in
and that's going to be our visual indicator
that focus mode is applied.
So now I can leave Drafts
and I can leave for any length of time,
the focus mode is going to override the settings
which would tell Drafts normally to open a new draught
and when I open up Drafts it's gonna take me
straight to that particular draught
that I have focus mode applied on.
So that can be handy
if we want to keep coming back to something
and keep adding things to it
like when I was doing some research
on the features for this tutorial.
I turned this on and every time I found something
that I thought I wanted demo, I would add it to that draught
and it wasn't forcing me to create a new draught
every time I open the application.
There's also a feature to arrange
the different blocks of text that we have inside of Drafts
so we can tap on the hamburger icon
on the lower menu bar there
and this allows us to arrange different blocks of text
or even different lines of text.
By default, it's blocks of text
and anywhere where it sees there's a space between lines
it's created a separate block of text.
I can tap on any of these blocks
and drag it wherever I would want it
and I can rearrange my draught very quickly
and easily this way and if I wanted to do it on a line basis
I could do that as well
just simply by tapping the line button.
In my experience I find the blocks much more useful.
Once you've arranged your draught the way you want it,
tap the done button and you can see in my example
that the changes I made
to the order of this particular draught are now saved.
Drafts also has a built-in tool for dealing with links
called a link mode.
Now I don't have any links in this draught.
Let's fix this and add one.
So I'm going to select the word dress
and use my markdown keyboard to tap the link button
and it's going to apply the brackets around the word
that I want to be the link and put the parentheses there
so I can just put in the URL that I want.
So I'm going to put in the URL for Drafts
and make Drafts the clickable link.
Now when I turn on the link mode,
it's going to make even if I didn't have
this markdown formatting, all of the URLs
that I have in my draught clickable.
So before I tap on the link mode,
my actual URL is greyed out
but when I turn link mode on, that URL is now tapable,
I can tap on it and it's going to take me to that URL.
So if you're doing research for a blog post for example
and you have a bunch of resources or links
in the document that you want to check,
you can do that in Drafts by turning the link mode on.
To the right of that is the icon
with the capital and lowercase letter A
and this is where we can adjust the appearance
of the Drafts application itself.
So Drafts has a theme that will auto switch
between light and dark if you want.
You can adjust the brightness threshold
that will trigger the switch or you can just tap
on the particular theme that you want.
So right now it's the light theme,
if I wanted it to be the dark theme I can just tap on dark
and both the light theme and dark theme settings
can be changed by tapping on the theme selection
in the next section.
Now this is a pro feature.
So if I wanted to change my dark theme
to this solarized dark, I can tap on that
and you can see it's gonna apply the changes right away.
Now I don't like that one very much.
I really prefer the dark theme on my iPhone 10
but I could also select my favourite version
of the light theme if I wanted.
I can also change the Drafts icon.
This is the default icon for Drafts
but there are several versions here
which I like a little bit better.
I happen to like this textured black version.
So I'm going to select that one
and now when we go back to our home screen in a little bit,
you're going to see the new Drafts icon.
There's also a section here for the syntax highlighting
so we can make it so that it doesn't highlight
any of the syntax.
We can make it so that it highlights markdown formatting,
we can use a simplified markdown formatting,
we can use tasks paper formatting
or even JavaScript formatting
and all that's going to do is give us
a visual indicator of the formatting.
So going back to our previous example
when we use the two asterisks
on either side of the word can't
because the formatting is set to markdown,
it's going to recognise that markdown formatting
and it's going to bold that particular word.
I like this a lot so I'm going to keep this as markdown.
There's also a whole bunch of font options.
So if we wanted to change the font that we're using
or we wanted to change the font size,
the line height, the paragraph spacing, the margins,
maybe we want paragraph numbers
next to every paragraph that shows up in our Draught.
We could toggle that on.
We could use autocorrect, spell checking, smart quotes,
smart dashes, even Auto apply capitalization
to our sentences or not.
There's also options to hide the status bar,
edit on draught selections and hide the toolbar when editing.
I like all of these settings the way they are
so I'm going to leave these for now
and you can also select the allowed orientations.
So right now it's going to switch back and forth
between portrait and landscape
but if you wanted to lock it into a particular orientation
like portrait or landscape you could tap on that
and that would make sure
that your phone doesn't rotate on you
when you are in the Drafts application.
Let's go back to Drafts
now that I've applied this dark theme
and take a look at what this looks like.
Okay and as I mentioned I've got an iPhone 10
with the OLED screen.
I really like this dark black.
So I'm going to leave this theme for now.
The last button in the lower right is the gear icon
and this is where all of our settings are.
So let's tap on this and take a look
at some of the settings that are available inside of Drafts.
Now there's a tonne of settings in here
and there's a reason that we're just getting to this now
after we've been using Drafts for a little bit.
That's because you need to understand how Drafts works
before you can understand
what some of these settings do.
So right away at the top it's going to show
whether you have purchased Drafts Pro or not.
Now the pro features we went over.
Those are available at the time of recording
it's a $1.99 per month or $19.99 per year
with a seven day free trial.
I like the ability to create and edit my actions
and I really like this dark theme.
So I use Drafts all the time,
it's definitely worth it for me
to pay that $1.99 per month.
The next section we've got some settings
for when we create a new draught.
So we can set a new draught to appear
after a certain time period.
The default I believe is 60 seconds.
We can change this simply by tapping
on the plus or the minus icons.
So if we hit the plus button,
it's going to change it to three minutes.
I hit it again it's gonna change it to five minutes.
That's kind of the sweet spot for me personally,
we can also toggle the focus mode.
The focus mode is going to disable
the automatic creation of new Drafts.
So if I toggle that on, the focus mode icon turns on.
I'm going to leave that off for now.
There's also a section here for notifications.
So if we tap on badge, we can use the badge
to show the inbox count.
When we toggle this on, if we've never allowed Drafts
the ability to use notifications previously,
it's gonna ask us to allow that.
I find the badge icon to be very handy
because it's going to show me with a red number
on an icon on my dock that there are things in Drafts
that I need to decide to do something with.
So that red visual indicator is enough of an annoyance
that it means that I consistently go through Drafts
and process the things that are in there.
So I'm gonna leave that on.
I'm gonna go back to my home screen,
show you what this looks like.
Okay we've got one draught in our inbox,
so the red badge is going to appear with a one in it
and that's going to be updated as I create new Drafts.
We can also apply a badge filter
so we could count instead of every draught in our inbox,
only the ones that are flagged in our inbox
and we could even apply some different tag filters there
if we wanted to do that.
I'm going to leave that for now though.
All right then we have the ability to play sounds
or turn that off so if you find that annoying,
you can turn that off.
For storage there's several options.
The first is iCloud sync.
Now iCloud sync is going to allow you to share your Drafts,
your actions and your histories
with all of the other Drafts instances
that you might be running on your other iOS devices.
So if you want to be able to add things to your Drafts inbox
from both your iPhone and your iPad for example,
you'll want to enable iCloud
and if you want to enable sync logging,
that can send you a log
of all of the things that might have gone wrong
and then if you wanted to reset everything,
you can tap that button at the bottom.
I'm obviously not going to do that right now.
The next button here and this is definitely
something you're going to want to enable,
is to enable spotlight indexing.
This allows you to search the contents of your Drafts
by using spotlight.
Let me give you an example here.
All right so I'm going to go back to my home screen,
I'm going to swipe down to get to spotlight
and I'm going to type the word Drafts
and the results here are going to show the applications
but it's also going to show under Drafts,
all of the Drafts that meet that criteria
and if I tap on one of these,
it will take me to that draught inside of Drafts.
So again that's using those specific Draught
unique identifiers links
to take you straight to the particular draught that you want.
Okay let's go back into our settings
and let's look at some of these other options.
There's the reminders import.
This allows us to import things into Drafts from reminders
and this can be handy if you wanted to use Siri
to add things to Drafts.
Let's give you an example, I'm going to toggle this on
and I'm going to assign a specific tag to this
because I'm going to be using Siri to capture these.
I'm going to apply the tag of Siri.
Okay now let's get out of here,
go back to our home screen.
I'm going to invoke Siri and I'm going to add a sample draught
to my Drafts list in reminders.
Okay now I've got a Drafts list in reminders
and Siri is going to add sample draught
to that particular list
and because I've enabled the reminders import
when I go back into Drafts and I swipe from the left here,
go back to my Inbox you can see I've got a sample draught
with the tag of Siri.
That setting has done everything that it's supposed to.
Now let's go back into our settings,
take a look at a few of the final features in here.
We can export things so if we wanted to export everything
that is in Drafts or just the inbox
or maybe even the archive,
we can export that in JSON or CSV format
then we've got the ability to back up our Drafts database.
These backups are stored in the slash Drafts
slash backup folder and I can tap the backup now button
to create a backup or I can run it periodically
by toggling this on.
I'm going to toggle it on and then tap backup now,
it's gonna tell me that my backup is complete
and those are for the Drafts themselves.
We can also backup all of our actions if we want.
So I'm going to toggle that on and again
tap the backup now button, get the confirmation message,
let's go back to our settings.
We can migrate things from Drafts IV
so if you're a previous Drafts user
and you have a bunch of things in Drafts already,
you don't have to start afresh.
You can bring all of those things
including your actions and your keys into Drafts V.
I've already done this so I don't want to do this again
but if I tapped on migrated Drafts,
it'll pull in everything and it will apply the tag
Drafts IV to all of those Drafts.
Alright couple more things under extensions,
we have share extension.
So this allows us to share things into Drafts.
It's going to show us the format that's going to be used
in this case it's marked down and then the web template
this is how we can control what is going to appear in Drafts
when we send something from Safari.
So if I exited Drafts and went into Safari for example
and then selected text from the web page
then used the share sheet icon and sent this to Drafts,
it's going to show me the title of the website,
it's going to show me the URL of the website
and it's going to copy over any selected text
from that particular website when it creates the draught.
So if you're using Drafts or web research,
that can be a very handy feature.
All right next is text expander,
so Drafts integrates with text expander.
If you are a text expander subscriber,
you can use your snippets inside of Drafts for iOS
and you can enable expansion
by toggling this button on right here
and you can even expand it
inside of the action templates if you want
and we can refresh the snippets by opening text expander,
I'm going to tap on that.
It's going to ask me if I want to open text expander,
yes I do.
Okay once it opens sex expander,
the snippets are then recognised
and we can close this setting.
All right then we've got credentials
for the different services that we've logged into
or authenticated.
You can see I've got my login credentials here
for Dropbox and Twitter
and if I wanted to forget one of these,
I don't want these stored anymore.
I just tapped the forget button.
I'm gonna leave those for now.
Okay let's go back to Drafts
and let's put things back the way they were.
Let's go to our appearance settings
and toggle back the light themes
so things are a little bit easier to see.
All right now that we've shown you
several of the basic actions available in Drafts
and covered a lot of the interface elements,
now let's go back and revisit actions
and show you how you can edit them.
So first I'm going to tap the plus icon in the tool bar
and create a new draught,
then I'm going to tap the Drafts icon
on the right side of the toolbar
to open up the basic grouping again
and we're going to edit the append to Dropbox
journal actions so I'm going to swipe
from left to right on that action
and it will reveal options to edit, duplicate
or delete this action.
I'm going to tap on edit and on this screen
where we can edit the action, we can edit the title
so I'm going to tap on the title
and get rid of this last word journal.
So it just says append to Dropbox
then I'm going to tap on the icon and I'm going to select
a different icon.
I'm gonna scroll down here till I find one that I like.
I kind of like this inkwell icon right here,
so I'll tap on this one.
Okay now I've got a new icon, we can also change the colour
simply by tapping on one of the colours
that are available here.
I'm going to make it orange
and then I'm going to tap on where it says one-step Dropbox
underneath the steps.
Okay so we can have multiple steps for these actions
but I want to edit this particular step
for this specific action.
By tapping on it I can see the individual step
that is going to take place when I run this action
and if I tap on this I can edit it.
So this step right here is looking for a file named journal
and it's got a couple of date modifiers in there.
It's stored in the root location
which we can tell from the path and then in the template
we've got two pound signs and then the date token,
a line break and then the draught token.
So this means that when I run this action,
it is going to append to the file with this name
in Dropbox it's going to put the date
and it's going to pull in the contents of the draught.
We can even choose where we want it to write it.
We can create the file, we can replace the file,
we can prepend which would put it
at the beginning of the file or append
which is going to put it at the end.
Now append is fine I'm just gonna leave that
and I'm going to change this date formatting here
and I'm going to put just the text May 2018.
So now when I run this action
it's going to look for the file journal-May2018.txt
and if it doesn't exist it's going to create it.
All right I'm gonna save an exit.
I'm going to tap to run this action.
I get the confirmation notification.
Now let's go back to Drafts and let's change this
and we'll add another amazing idea,
then we're going to tap on the Drafts icon
in the upper right and we're going to run the append
to Dropbox action one more time
and if we have our appended Dropbox action set up correctly,
we should now have two entries in this text file.
So let's leave Drafts, we'll invoke spotlight
on our iOS device by dragging down on the screen.
We'll search for Dropbox,
okay and there is our journal-May 2018.txt file.
Let's tap on that, take a look at what this looks like.
Okay this is a preview of the txt file but you can see
it's following the formatting that we set forth
in that action and Drafts.
We've got the two pound signs and the dates
and then the contents of the draught after the line break.
So this action is running exactly as it's supposed to be
and appending things to a list and Drafts like this
could be great if I wanted to keep track of
maybe a list of books that I wanted to read
or movies that I wanted to watch,
lots of different use cases for this
but using that append action,
that's how you would add things to the bottom of the list.
Okay so now we know how to edit actions.
Let's go back to Drafts and take a look
at setting up groups of actions.
To do this we've got to tap
the Drafts icon in the upper right
which is going to open that basic grouping again
but if we tap on the circle next to basic,
we're gonna see the different groups that we have.
There's a basic group and then
there's the two keyboard groups that I've used.
These are buttons that appear on the keyboard in Drafts
for either basic or markdown formatting.
I want to create a new group
so I'm going to tap on the manage button
then on the manage group screen
I'm going to tap the plus icon in the upper right
then I'm gonna name my group screencastsonline,
I'm gonna pick a new icon for it,
I like this thumbs up icon.
We'll make it red and then we've got the actions
that are part of this group.
We don't need any actions
that are pertaining to this group.
We can also toggle on the visibility as a keyboard.
I'm going to leave that off for now
and then there's some advanced settings.
So after success we can automatically
take action on the draught by archiving it,
putting it in the trash or asking us what we want to do.
The default is going to be nothing
and that's what we've seen so far.
I'm just gonna leave that for now
and then we've got the action directory.
So we can share this group of actions
with the action directory and then the Drafts community
can download the entire group
and start using them right away.
We're not going to worry about that right now either.
Alright so we've got our group created,
I'm going to go back and then I'm going to tap
on screencastsonline and we can see on this screen
that there are no actions inside of this group.
So I'm going to tap on the plus icon in the lower-right
to add an action and here we've got a couple options.
We can add a new action from scratch,
we can visit the actions directory
if we wanted to download some that are already created,
we can edit the group looking at the settings
that we just covered, we can manage all of our groups
or we could import an entire group.
I am going to add a new action
by tapping on the visit directory button.
That takes us to our browser,
to the action directory and from here
we can search for the specific action that we want.
Now I saw an action in here which allowed you
to take markdown and send it to email.
So I'm going to search for markdown.
There's a whole bunch of markdown based actions here.
I'm going to go to the next page
and on the second page we see one here
called markdown mail.
This is posted by the user you can see right there
is agile tortoise and that's actually the developer.
Tapping on the markdown mail link
is going to give me a little bit of a description
of what's in this particular action
and I like this action because it's going to allow me
to convert markdown formatting into HTML
for sending in my mail messages on my iOS device.
So this is something that is really really hard to do
in the normal iOS mail app interface
and Drafts makes this a lot simpler.
We can also see a little bit about how this action works
because it says right in the description
that the message is going to include
the first line of the draught as a subject line
and the rest of the draught is going to be converted to HTML.
If we scroll down we can see the template there,
the two CC, BCC, the subject template, the body template
sent as HTML and whether we want to send it
in the background.
We'll dig into some of those specifics but for now
let's just instal this by tapping on the instal button.
The pop-up is going to ask me
if I want to open this in Drafts.
If I tap open that's all I need to do.
The action will be imported
and I just have to pick the group that I want to put it in.
I'm going to select the screencastsonline group,
I'll get the notification that the action was imported
and now we can see I've got a markdown male action
underneath my screencastsonline header.
So this action is now ready to be used.
Let's take a look at what it does.
Now this isn't really formatted very well for a mail message
so I'm gonna go back to Drafts
and I'm gonna go actually into my archive folder
and select the draught with the title check out Drafts
which is the one we used in the previous email example.
All right so here's our message
but before I can send this
I want to turn that word Drafts into a link.
That's gonna make it much easier for the recipient
to just tap or click on that link,
when they get it in their email client
and it will take them right to the Drafts web page.
So again I'm going to highlight that word Drafts,
I'm gonna use the markdown keyboard to tap the link button,
I'll get the markdown formatted link
and I'll put in the URL.
Okay now I've got my message ready to go,
I'm going to tap the Drafts button in the upper right
tap on markdown mail and this time
you can see the markdown formatting
has been converted to an HTML link.
All I have to do as the recipient of this email,
if I want to download Drafts is tap on that
or click on that link.
So again this is something that's very hard to do
in the iOS mail application.
Drafts makes it incredibly easy.
Now I don't really want to send this message
so I'm going to tap cancel.
Let's go back to our actions screen and next
we want to add more than one action at a time.
We want to import an entire group from the actions directory
into our instance of Drafts running on our iPhone.
So again we're going to tap the plus icon
in the lower-right,
again we're going to tap on visit directory
but this time in the actions directory homepage,
we're going to tap on that second bullet point
recent action groups.
I'm gonna scroll down this list
and I'm going to look for a specific group
called actions searches.
Again this is posted by agile tortoise,
so this is the developer.
If I tap on action searches it's going to show
a group of actions that I can use
to search just about anything.
I'm going to tap on the instal button,
it's gonna again ask me if I want to open this in Drafts,
I'll tap open and then I've got an option
to import or cancel the entire action group.
There are seven actions here, I'm going to import them all,
I get the confirmation notification
that the action group has been imported
and now if I look at the groups that I have available,
I have a group called actions searches.
So I can tap on that group
and we've got all of the different actions
that we can take here.
Let's go back to Drafts and show you how this might work.
Maybe I want to search for Drafts iOS.
Okay I could do a normal Google search but in this case
I want to find some videos that are going to show me
some of the cool features of Drafts so I'll tap on YouTube
and then I will see a list of the search results
for videos on YouTube that include the search term
that I put in Drafts.
So you can see that there's lots of cool stuff
that we can do simply by importing actions
that already exist but I also want to show you
how you can create your own actions in Drafts.
So let's go back to our screencasts online group
and again tap the plus icon in the lower right
and this time we're going to select add new action.
We're going to build an action from scratch.
Okay now this example I want to use
because it's going to show you a couple different things
that maybe aren't so obvious when you start using Drafts.
We're going to create an action which is going to allow us
to select an input from a couple different buttons
and then do something with that.
So I'm going to use this colour palette right here
as inspiration and we're going to call this action
favourite colour.
We're gonna select an icon for this.
So I'm gonna find one that I like here,
I like this pencil icon.
We'll make it green and then we're going to tap on
where it says zero steps to create a new step
and we're going to tap the plus icon in the upper right
and then select prompt from the list.
Now there's a whole bunch of stuff that you can do here
and keep in mind that when you build these actions,
you can have more than one step.
So if you wanted to copy something to the clipboard,
send it as an email and it send it as a message,
you could do that using the first three types of steps
and put them sequentially
but I want to show you
if we scroll down here a little bit further,
we've got some more advanced things that we can use
and this is where I'm going to select prompt.
So we want a prompt with buttons that we can use
to select an input.
Now when you select an action,
you're going to see the top of it the key and the title.
Now this is going to help us identify
what we can do with this when we use it
in the action itself.
So there's a description right below there
which says that the key is used to generate tags
for use in templates like prompt_button.
That is what we're going to use.
Now the message itself this is what would appear
above the actual prompt.
So this I'm going to just create a short message
that says what is your favourite colour
and then we're going to scroll down
and get into the specifics of this.
So we've got an input text field,
I'm gonna leave that off for now.
If we wanted to have a message field
where we could include some information,
that's what that would do and then we've got the buttons.
There's a toggle to allow the cancel button.
That would cancel the action and then right now
we've only got the one button which says okay,
I'm going to create several new buttons
and these are all going to be separated by a pipe character.
So I'm going to create one for red, blue, green,
yellow and orange.
This is going to give me five different buttons
when this action runs.
So you could even use Drafts
to create some basic automations
that don't even rely on the input of the text
that you've captured.
So there's our step.
If I tap on save and exit it's going to take me
all the way back.
I want to go back to the steps screen
so I'm going to tap on steps instead
and then I'm going to tap on the plus icon again
and add another step.
So now we're going to have an input
from selecting the prompt button
and I want to do something with that.
So the next step I'm going to select message.
Now here you can see the default message action
is going to include the double square brackets
and the draught content.
I don't really want to use that
so I'm going to tap in there and change this
and use the other template tag that you saw prompt_button.
That's going to pull in
the label of the button that we select.
Now that alone in a message is not very exciting
so let's go back to the beginning of this
and add some context and we'll say
my favourite colour is and then the input,
thought you should know...
Okay so now we're gonna take that input
and we're going to run another action after it
which is going to open a text message
with that colour embedded and we can send that
to whoever we want.
This time we're going to tap save and exit
and go back to the actions screen
and let's tap on this to run it.
I'll show you what it looks like.
So here's the prompt, what is your favourite colour.
I am going to tap on orange
and then the second step of that action,
it's going to open up a new message with the text
including the input.
So my favourite colour is orange, thought you should know
and we can send this to whoever we want.
So that's a simple example of a multi-step action
that you can create in Drafts.
I don't actually want to send this message
so I'm going to tap cancel and I want to show you
one additional example which is something that we'll instal
from the action directory
on how you could take this concept to the next level
which would allow you to select multiple inputs.
All right so let's tap on the plus icon in the lower-right,
tap on visit directory and what we're looking for
is an action which will allow us to send a message
to a group of people.
Okay and here is the group message action.
If I tap on this it's going to give me an explanation
of what this does and we can see from the description here
that this action is going to allow us
to select people from a list
that we want to send a message to.
So if you have a bunch of family members
that you occasionally send a group messages to
but sometimes you don't want to send it to all of them
then an action like this might be handy.
Now there's some code here
which we're not really gonna get into
but it explains what's going on in the action itself.
I'm just going to instal it as is
by tapping the instal button
and if we wanted to edit that action,
we could go in there and change the names
and the phone numbers,
but I just want to show you how this works.
So let's go back to Drafts and tap the plus icon
to create a new draught and send a message
to a group of people.
Who wants to go to Mac stock with me this summer?
Okay then let's tap on the Drafts icon
on the right side of the tool bar,
tap on the group message action.
The action will run in the first step here
we're going to select the people that we want send it to
so I'm gonna select Marsha, Jan and Cindy
and then when I tap on okay,
it's going to open up a group message
to those specific people with the message,
who wants to go to max stock with me this summer.
Now because I installed this from the action directory
and don't know these people,
I don't want to send this message.
I'm going to tap on the cancel button and go back to Drafts.
Now there's another thing I want to show you in Drafts
which would allow you to use it for basic checklists.
I'm going to go back to the main Drafts screen,
tap on the plus icon to create a new draught
and if I go back to the basic keyboard
and I scroll to the right you can see that
there's a task button.
So I can tap the task button to create a check box
and I can create a simple list of things
that I'll need to do.
So these things that are marked as tasks
with the blue brackets.
I can tap inside the blue brackets
and I can check those things off
just like I would on a simple to-do list.
So if you just want to jot down a quick list
and you don't want to send the whole thing
to your task manager
you could even do something like that in Drafts.
You can also do a lot
with the different portions of your draught.
So let's go back to our email example
and again let's craft an email message.
Again the first line is the subject line
and then everything below that is the message itself.
So once I've got my message typed out,
I'm going to tap on the Drafts icon in the upper right
and then we're going to go back to our basic group
and we're going to edit this mail action
and then I'm going to tap on the step here
where it says mail and customise this.
Now if you remember the first time
that we ran this default mail action,
it took the first line as the title
but it also included that first line of the title
in the body itself and I don't want to do that
so I'm going to change some of these tokens or tags
as they're called inside of Drafts
so that I get only the information that I want.
So the one that is enclosed in square brackets
and says title, that's going to be
the first line of the draught.
The one below that in double brackets that says draught,
is the entire contents of the draught.
I can change that though and select something like body.
The body tag includes the remainder of the draught
after the first line is removed.
Alright so I want just the body of the message,
not the entire draught and now if I go back
and run this action, it does what it's supposed to do.
It's got the subject line but that subject line
does not appear in the body itself.
All right now I'm not going to send that message.
Now there are a lot of other template tags that you can use
and you can see all of the templates and tags
that draught supports at this website here
but another one I want to use as an example
is the selection tag.
So if we go back and we change body to selection,
that means that when we run the action,
it will import only the text that is selected.
So if I wanted to select just the first part of this message
and then I run the action,
you can see it's only going to pull in that first line.
The next thing I want to show you
is the Drafts messages app.
So you can create messages or Drafts
inside of the Drafts application
and you can import them in messages.
So let's go into the messages app here.
And I'm gonna tap on the apps button.
Okay and I've got draught selected
but you might have to select it
from all the different apps that you have installed
but once you tap on the Drafts app,
it will pull in all of the Drafts
that you have stored in the application.
So if I wanted to pull in text from this max TOC draught,
all I have to do is tap on that and it's going to put
the entire text of that draught in messages
and just like the Drafts app we have access
to not only the Drafts that are in the inbox
but also the flagged Drafts as well as the archived Drafts
and if we wanted to filter these,
we can do that as well simply by selecting a tag filter
and we can even search for specific draught
by tapping on the magnifying glass icon.
The last thing I want to cover in this tutorial
is the Drafts application for the Apple watch.
This is my most used Apple watch application.
Now I don't have a way to show you
this running on the Apple watch itself
but I'm going to open up the watch app on my iPhone
and show you what settings you need to setup.
All right so here's my watch screen,
I'm gonna scroll down and we see that Drafts is installed
so if I tap on Drafts,
there's a couple very important settings here.
So number one we want to show this on the Apple watch.
Number two, you can set it to auto capture
from the complication.
I use this all the time.
So that means that I have Drafts
in the upper right on my watch face,
when I tap on that Drafts complication icon,
it opens up Drafts then it automatically
starts recording a new draught using Siri.
So that saves me an additional tap
and I've found using Siri on the Apple watch
to record things to Drafts is surprisingly accurate.
I use this all the time even when I'm out for a run
it does a very good job
of recognising what I'm trying to say
and all I have to do is simply tap that complication once
then it records what I wanted to say,
I tap again to end the recording
and I go back to what I'm doing.
This is the easiest way in my opinion
to capture things using Drafts.
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So that's it for this episode on Drafts for iOS.
We've only just begun to explore
what Drafts is capable of
but you should have a pretty good idea by now
of how to use it and what it can do.
You can do quite a bit
without subscribing to the pro version,
so put it in your dock, use it for a week or two
and see if it sticks.
If you're like me, you'll soon find Drafts is irreplaceable
as a quick capture notepad and a major help
in many of your text manipulation workflows on iOS
but that's it for this episode.
We'll be back next week
with another edition of Screen Casts Online.
See you soon.
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