We are super excited to launch Drafts Web Capture, a new way to capture text to your Drafts library, from any modern web browser, on any platform!
What is Drafts Web Capture?
Drafts Web Capture is a web page that integrates directly with your Drafts iCloud storage, allowing the creation of drafts from any web browser on any platform. Key use cases for Drafts Web Capture:
You are someplace you do not have access to the Drafts app directly. On a Windows PC at work? Have an Android tablet? Now you can capture that idea directly to Drafts without pulling out your iPhone.
You want to use Drafts as a bookmark library, read-it-later service, or general research tool to keep up with links and text quotes from web pages. Combined with a bookmarklet (examples below), Draft Web Capture makes it smooth and easy to enable such workflows.
Drafts Web Capture should work in most modern browsers (Safari, Chrome, Firefox) on any platform (Windows, Linux, Android - as well as macOS, iOS).
Might indicate inability to load the iCloud libraries, maybe on a work network? If you continue to have issues, please open a ticket (support@getdrafts.com) with details about browser/platform/network.
Only thing I’ve noticed is, that in Chrome(book), some of the Keyboard shortcuts listed at the bottom of the capture window, conflict with those in Chrome.
I am so happy about this, and it works great on my Android Pixel phone.
I prefer the Android OS for phones (ONLY for phones – you’ll have to pry my iPad out of my cold, dead hands). I’ve wished for an Android Drafts app since Drafts first came out for iOS. I’ve tried to think of some way to hack being able to capture text for Drafts via my Android phone. And now I can, no hack required!
I’ve already tried this and it works great. I have now bookmarked the URL to my Android home screen.
THIS is the solution those of us with Windows desktop machines and iOS-running handsets have been asking for from writing apps… What’s odd is that I only speak to one other person regularly who uses Drafts and we were just talking at length this morning about this…
So I see it’s not Facebook or Alexa who’s been listening to my conversations all this time…But Drafts!!
This feature is very useful in Windows. I can finally drop text into Drafts in my work-issued Windows machine.
I’m exploring a way to have a web browser window configured to appear when I key in a Keyboard Shortcut
I’m wondering if there are any plans to make a simple window taskbar program that pops up, let me enter text and saves through Web Capture. Maybe an API for aspiring developers to do?
No plans for that, but you might also look at automatic import. If you setup iCloud Drive on your Window machine, you can enable that and just save to text files in the Inbox and have them appear in Drafts. Lots of ways to automate saving to text files on Windows.
That’s interesting. Thank you. I’ll see how I can set up notepad++ (or maybe an even smaller and fast markdown editor) to launch and auto save into the iCloud Inbox then.
Hi, I am unable to get it installed on Chrome. I have been slowly killing off other extensions to figure out what is blocking it. Are there known extension conflicts?
It is a web site and you can use a bookmarklet for it. There’s no extension, in fact, there’s nothing really to install.
Have you watched the video in the first post explaining how to access and use it? If you have, perhaps you could describe the steps you are following and the error you are encountering?
