APC Australia - September 2019

Drafts claims to be the quickest

way to capture ideas and tasks, and

it’s been a big hit on iOS.

It’s now available for Mac, letting

you create new notes (‘drafts’) in

several ways: you can click on the

menu bar icon to bring up the Drafts

pop-up; you can create a note in the

main app window; or you can

highlight an item in another app and

use the share sheet to send it to

Drafts. This option creates a new

Drafts

A speedy way to create notes on your Mac.

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draft without switching into the

Drafts app. You can also create your

own keyboard shortcuts to send

whatever’s in your Mac’s clipboard to

the app as a new draft.

Drafts has automatic syntax

highlighting: Markdown (the default),

MultiMarkdown or GitHubMarkdown,

JavaScript, SimpleList, TaskPaper or

good old-fashioned plain text. You can

tag or flag notes as you go for easy

retrieval, and you can change the

formatting defaults. Navigation is

simple and effective, and there’s a

useful versioning tool that makes it

easy to browse different versions of a

draft.

ACTIONS REQUIRED

The core app is free, but to unlock

some of the more advanced features

you’ll need to sign up for a Pro

subscription. This is cross-platform,

and it gives you extra widgets, more

sharing and capturing options, editor

themes, as well as multiple

workspaces. In iOS, the Pro version

can also create and edit Actions.

Actions are a key reason for Drafts’

iOS success, and they provide lots

of automation options for

manipulating notes and using them in

other apps. They aren’t currently

available for the Mac version, but the

Mac app does include the URL

schemes from its iOS counterpart.

These enable other apps to send data

to Drafts using URL callbacks; for

example, you can create a URL to

make a new draft or open a specific

one, replace characters or search for

particular content.

While full Actions support is

promised for later versions, the

current lack of it means that Drafts

on the Mac is considerably less

powerful than its iOS sibling and the

Pro subscription is considerably less

tempting. Nevertheless, Drafts on the

Mac is asolidandusefulnote-taking

app that’sgreatforcapturing ideas

quickly. Carrie Marshall

There are lots of customisation options, but themes are

limited and some are locked if you don’t have a Pro plan.

Drafts highlights syntax

for languages, including

JavaScript and Markdown.

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