App of the Week – Drafts

A while back, I wrote a piece on one of my favorite and most frequently used apps, Phraseology, developed by the guys over at Agile Tortoise. This week I take a look at its latest creation, the aptly titled quick launch note taking and text prepping app, Drafts.

So as I am not (yet) a full-time writer, I can unfortunately not spend as much time on my craft as I would like to. This means that I can only devote small amounts of time to thinking about and researching the pieces while I am at the office. But as anybody who tries to balance two or more professions will know, it becomes quite difficult to stop my mind from wandering about one thing while I should be busy with something else.

For instance, while compiling reports on a client’s past campaign performance to be presented at our next meeting, my mind starts to think about which apps to check out next, or what category I should focus on over the coming weeks. What I normally do in this situation is write the thought down on a scrap of paper and put it aside until I’m ready for it. This way, I can continue with what I’m doing and not forget about that thought. The problem is that these scraps of paper generally end up on the floor under my desk, and don’t actually get the chance to grow into the articles that I put out here every week.

Enter Drafts, a deliciously simple but incredibly powerful little note taking, thought collecting, reminder scribbling app that provides you with a blank page that you can work on within nanoseconds of launching it. The beauty about this is that your thought or idea can be jotted down and saved in a very short space of time, thereby decreasing the risk of you missing out a couple of details or forgetting everything completely. Drafts then allows you to email it, copy it to your clipboard, preview it in a number of formats and most importantly, tweet it.

Tweets are a large part of what Drafts is all about. Within its simple and uncluttered display, the app has a real-time character and word counter, perfect for those who love to tweet throughout the day. What rounds it all off is that you can now plan your tweets, measure their character counts, edit them accordingly and save them for later.

As for the actual tweeting of your brilliant and witty 140 character long statements, Drafts does this perfectly. Greg at Agile Tortoise has made integration with Twitter, as well as Tweetbot, incredibly simple…I actually can’t remember ever entering my account details into the app! Both interactions work flawlessly and I can seriously see Drafts becoming a weapon of choice in the arsenals of serial tweeters around the world.

I also like to use Drafts when I’m on a flight and have no access to my email. In those few hours above the ground, I find that I can carefully compose a number of emails that I need to get out and send them as soon as I hit the ground. This beats writing up a storm once I’ve landed and am walking towards my rental, and also makes sure that I’m not wasting the time that I am disconnected.

Design wise, I’ve seen some criticism about the visuals on Twitter but I think the complete opposite. Yes, it’s largely made up of various shades of brown (with a couple of other options available in the settings menu), but the thing is that with an app like this, which is tailored to be a quick use app, I’m not really bothered with what it looks like. I would rather focus on how clever it is that the app window is carefully split into two parts, one for the writing area, and the other perfectly sized to fit the pop-up keyboard. There is no jumping about or switching between screens, Drafts is a minimalist, functions based app that performs the task it is designed to do without any hassle, and isn’t that what an app is supposed to do?

I would highly recommend Drafts, and the other Agile Tortoise apps Phraseology and Terminology, to anyone who likes to record quick ideas and thoughts. At 99c, it is quite a steal and its Twitter integration is worth a lot more than that.

Name: Drafts
Seller: Agile Tortoise
Category: Productivity
Size: 1 MB
Price: $0.99

Available for iPhone