ANN: Drafts Web Capture! Add to Drafts from any browser

Absolutely wonderful. Just got it working on a Chromebook. Such a nice surprise.

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.

  • Shift+Ctrl+B shows/hides bookmarks bar
  • Shift+Ctrl+T duplicates the current tab

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.

Thank you!

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Didn’t need to in the end. I tried again now and it just worked.

Good stuff!

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This is BRILLIANT.

THANKYOU.

IT WORKS JUST LIKE YOU SAID.

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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!! :bowing_man: :raised_hands: :wink:

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Awesome! Finally I can also capture when I’ve booted my mac to windows for work! :slight_smile:

I always said that Drafts is one of the very few real applications on iOS (not only an app) but now I have to find a new word for what Drafts is.

As a software engineer we may call it a ITE (integrated text enviroment) - thank you so much @agiletortoise

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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.

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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?

Hi, yes, I have used the bookmarketlet and it has been failing consistently. So not sure how to troubleshoot it.

I basically grab the bookmarklet to my browser.

Then I click on it.

It asks to authenticate to iCloud.

After successfully doing so, it takes me back to the original page asking me to authenticate to iCloud.

  1. Which of the bookmarklets are you using?
  2. Does the other bookmarklet work for you?
  3. Have you tried disabling any ad blockers you might be running?
  4. What happens if you visit the https://capture.getdrafts.com page directly and login, rather than the bookmarklet?
  5. Do either of the bookmarklets, or the capture page work for you in a Chrome incognito session?
  6. Do either of the bookmarklets, or the capture page work for you in another browser (not Chrome) on the same device?
  7. Do either of the bookmarklets, or the capture page work for you in a Chrome browser on a different device?
  1. I have used both; neither work
  2. I am not currently running ad blockers (although plan to add some)
  3. Same problem: I login, it redirects to icloud, then I go back to that same page
  4. It works in Incognito: I set on pop up but it opens a separate full tab
  5. It works for Firefox sort of…I always use Pop up, but it just opens the drafts page as a separate tab.

So, you can login via other sessions which suggests you have some rogue profile setting or bad cookie. It would be worth trying to clear your cookies to see if that resolves the login loop.

The pop-up always going into new tabs; check your browser settings to see if you have something set to always open in new tabs rather than new windows.

@agiletortoise Thank you! Some issues with brave browser. After i log in, it works fine on chrome, but does nothing on brave. brave is also a chromium browser.

I have disabled the shields for the capture.drafts and apple id.

I did clear the cookies associated with the getdrafts domain. Others to remove? I can try again after delete all cookies.

The issue is occurring for iCloud login, so I would try clearing any cookies associated with that domain too. In fact, I would just clear out any Apple domain cookies just to be doubly sure - but I’m not convinced it would be necessary.

Also do clear the browser cache in case it is some temporary file that is persisting and thwarting the login effort.