Has anyone seen a video rundown on the new iOS update (v22) anywhere? I want to get up to date, but have trouble visualizing the new stuff from text descriptions.
(I wouldn’t mind an update all-over tutorial encompassing recent changes, since I’m pretty new to the app, but I don’t expect to see that anywhere for a while…)
Drafts has definitely entered the land where I need some sort of a tutorial. I’m using less than 1% of what it can do but I’m overwhelmed at trying to learn more about it. Having the information all in one place (for Mac and iOS) would be ideal.
Maybe MacSparky would do a Field Guide?
Remember the conversation the other day about a wiki for building actions? Videos would sit well alongside such a thing.
full fledged field guide! Yes please…
Yep. We need just some willing authors and maintainers - I could set up a github repository and configure a jekyll site.
I would also be willing to write content of course. Especially on JavaScrip and Python automation.
There’s quite a bit of video content, a lot of it by MacSparky, on the Screencssts page and YouTube channel - including links to some great long form dives at ScreenCasts Online.
Video content is expensive to produce well, gets a bit dated quickly, and with something as broad as Drafts, is hard to focus on specific use cases. It’s also great for the way some people learn, and I hope to do more in 2021, but focused videos on each update would not be a good use of the limited resources I can devote to it.
Sorry for the confusion Greg – I was not at all suggesting that you should create the video content.
I was thinking of MacSparky’s Field Guides or some such. SCO is a good option too.
Now if you could convince David to do a field guide, that might be something worth trying, but definitely not doing it yourself. You already have a full-time job.
Well, I didn’t mean me doing it. I more mean me paying someone to do it…wherein the limited resource is money. I invented quite a bit in the Drafts 4 series David did - and he does a great job - but now a lot of that content is of limited use.
A definite downside of Drafts moving fast, is that it is really hard to keep any accompanying documentation and tutorials up to date.
The learning curve is something I’m well aware of and want to work on easing in the coming year.
Yeah, I wouldn’t expect you guys to produce newly refreshed tutorials after every upgrade. I was hoping for third party.
OTOH it would be a great idea if you could put out a quick informal video demo of new features for new versions. It’s 100% support, not marketing, so you could surely whip something like that together in one hour.
The problem with upgrade log feature lists is that you guys are so close to it that you express it in dense jargon, which can be hard for more newbie users to parse (your die-hards get it, though).
The learning curve is something I’m well aware of and want to work on easing in the coming year.
I feel like Drafts is a moving train I’ve been trying to hop onto for about 3-4 years now. So it mostly just sits there on my phone. And every time I work up the initiative to really plunge in, there’s some long list of new features in a new update, like now. I’m certainly not complaining about innovation, but I can’t be the only one in this predicament.
The interesting problem is what to focus on, for sure. Drafts is a very flexible tool, and people use it in a lot of different ways.
I have tried to address some of that with the integration guides and tips on this site (some of which have short videos)…but I have really dropped off on creating and updating those in the last year. I do have plans to revisit and update some of those and add a few new ones in the coming months.
Are the quick tips for new features like this helpful?
There’s usually supporting article for new features in the User Guide linked through from release notes as well, like the Widgets article.
Those things are helpful, sure, but the problem is you take a silo approach, with different feature sets explained in different places, which is overwhelming. Fine for super users, who know what’s useful to them, so they know where to head for info, but newbies don’t know enough to decide what they need to know, so they go to a jillion places to try to gather it all, which adds to the overwhelmedness.
The problem of flexibility - serving myriad use cases - is obviously not unique to Drafts. My suggestion (I’m pretty good at this having founded a popular web community at the dawn of time that served many different purposes to many different people) is that you’re over-estimating how much you need to cater to personal adaptation. Humans are hard-wired to watch demonstrations of irrelevant use cases and apply/adapt it to their unique needs. They’ll do that work for you.
As is, you are forking and fragmenting (thinking like devs!) to explain and cater to diverse use cases, and this increases complexity on our end as well as yours. Maybe you need to formalize the different use cases for marketing, but I’d avoid that morass for support purposes.
Show us someone using Drafts in real-case scenarios, at nearly normal speed, with only light narration. We’ll pick up the gist faster than you think. Don’t sweat that most of us won’t be creating invoices for a wholesale pipe fitting business. Just let us GET THE FEEL. Don’t under-pace…don’t teach, show. If you approach like this with, say, three very distinct use cases, you can trust users to adapt and personalize on THEIR end. A pull, not a push.
If you could produce such a demo and re-do it for major releases, that would be optimal. If not, re-do it every X releases but do produce a visual run-down of new features for each release, again, showing a few real-world use cases (again - bears repeating! - we can self-adapt and personalize better than you realize). Don’t make them slow and pedantic (we can read support materials for fine details). Just give the flavor of the new tricks. Like looking over the shoulder of a real-world Drafts user.
Sorry I went on a bit, but this sort of thing is an interest of mine, so I’m actually forcing myself to be terse!
There are people like @carl_pullein who do videos around use cases and features.
Here’s a playlist of ten of his Drafts videos on YouTube:
I think that having real people using it in real world scenarios works well for the types of walkthroughs that you seem to be describing. Having a breadth of people producing such content would give a range of insights rather than just Greg’s own.
While Greg has already shown that he has many of his own use cases, they can’t be as diverse as those from across the community (not practically). But, I think that what Greg can do far better than anyone else is deliver informational content that can help those creative people spark the ideas that they can then put into practice and then impart through video, and other mediums.
Now, whether that works best as a demo video, a set of release notes, a tips guide, or something else, depends on the person. Personally, I love a good set of detailed release notes - but I’ve never made the pretence of being normal 
Actually I don’t know about video. I do know about wiki and code samples.