Drafts 15.0 (iOS) Released - Huge iOS 13 update!

News & Updates
1

Drafts 15.0 (iOS) is now available in the App Store, details below.

Related Updates

Along with this update, we will also be launching new User Guide and Scripting Reference websites, dramatically improving the available Drafts support documentation. Please visit these sites for more information and, if you haven’t yet, create an account at the Drafts Community to keep up with the latest news, tips and more.

Mac Note

Release 15 for Mac is also available. It’s highly recommended you update all versions of Drafts to the newer version.

Interface and Functional Improvements

  • Rewritten main user interface and gesture interface
  • General improvements to responsive of gestures.
  • Support for pinning both drafts and actions on larger screens, easier access to pinning, remembering pin states.
  • Lots of little improvements to icons, the keyboard switcher, and other user interface elements throughout the app.
  • Support for multiple windows (iPadOS 13 only).
  • Dragging draft from the draft list to a new window, or just opening new Drafts instances dragging the app icon to split views and slide overs.
  • Edit actions in separate window.
  • Live Markdown previews in a separate window. Learn more
  • Automatic dark and light mode switching (iOS 13 only). Drafts already supported dark mode, but now if “automatic” switching it enabled, it will be done based on current system mode on iOS 13.
  • Contextual menus where appropriate throughout the app (iOS 13 only)
  • Contextual menus appear when you long press some items in Drafts. For example:
  • Press and hold on a draft in the draft list or action in the action list for options.
  • The workspaces and action group buttons near the bottom of those lists, respectively. Tap and hold for a quick switching menu.
  • New Quick Capture action extension. Functions similarly to the existing Drafts share extension, but requires no user interaction - just captures the shared content and returns. Details
  • Live Markdown Previews (iPadOS 13 only). A live preview can be opened in a separate window to allow a draft to be edited and preview viewed simultaneously. This is similar to preview functionality available in the Mac version of Drafts.
  • Support for new iOS 13 font selection panels
  • Dictation interface now has an optional silence timeout. Useful for those who trigger dictation hands-free via Siri and want the app to automatically save the draft after they stop dictation for a period of time. Can be configured to 10, 30 or 60 seconds.
  • Refreshing of icons and a variety of minor improvements throughout the app.

Shortcuts

  • Extensive support for new features of Shortcuts on iOS/iPadOS 13. A full set of shortcuts, with parameter support, allow you to create, update, append and prepend to drafts, query drafts, run actions, and more. Use of advanced Shortcuts automation requires a pro subscription. For details about available actions, see the automation documentation. In almost all cases it is better to use these Shortcuts over the URL-based ones that ship with previous versions of Shortcuts. Keep an eye on the the forums over the coming weeks as we plan to publish some example Shortcuts that take advantage of these new capabilities.

Workspaces & Draft List

  • Default Workspace. This is a special workspace that stores the preferred default settings for the draft list, and is applied when filters are cleared. This way, if you have workspaces that applies sort or display settings, clearing the list filters will also reset those back to your preferred default settings. The default workspace can be configured like any other workspace in the workspace manager. Workspaces are a Pro feature, but the default workspace is available in the free version. Details
  • Separate Workspace switcher. List options “…” are just for list options now. Workspaces can be selected using the workspace switcher at the bottom of the draft list. Tap and hold (on iOS 13) for quick switcher menu.
  • "Show Date" display option for drafts list and workspaces. Hide/show the date in the list. Along with other display settings, this allows everything but the draft title to be removed, for the minimalists out there.

Other Changes and Updates

  • Fix: Update Todoist integrations to use new API endpoints. The old ones were discontinued in early September cause some Todoist integrations in Drafts to fail.
  • New: Keyboard shortcut support in the Share extension (cmd-return to save, cmd-T for tag entry, etc.)
  • Change: If a selection is present in the editor, the character / word counts now include a selection character count as well.
  • Change: All default HTML preview templates have been updated with CSS-based support for dark mode. If you have existing preview actions, update them by editing the action and using the “reset” button to update the template - or reinstall the latest versions from the action directory. Updated versions of the preview actions: Basic Preview, Foghorn Preview, Swiss Preview
  • New: HTML.escape(string) and HTML.unescape(string) javascript functions to encode and decode HTML entities in a string. Details
  • New: Event script object now support url property. Details
  • Change: Long press on link in link mode will now fall through to options menu (with Preview on iOS 13).
  • Change: Regular expression find will now treat escaped whitespace characters (e.g. \n, \t) in replacement text as those characters, rather than expecting the whitespace itself. More consistent with how regex replacements are done in other editors.
  • Change: Find and replace screen should remember last state of “Show options”.
  • Fix: Markdown syntax definitions did not handle reference link properly.
  • Fix: Markdown syntaxes incorrectly identifying indented ordered list items as indented code.
  • Fix: Improve markdown header recognition in syntax highlighting definitions to allow # in header text.
  • Fix: Navigating drafts list with keyboard shortcuts should scroll the list if necessary.
  • Fix: editor.load() method should touch the accessed date of the draft.
  • Change: Allow “new draft after” timeout to be set to “Never” to allow it to be disabled separately from focus mode.
  • New: Select > Operations > Export now supports text file option, which merges draft contents into one text file.
  • Fix: Issue where API calls in actions could fail improperly if the OAuth token expired and needed to be refreshed.
  • Change: Support for iOS 11 has been removed.

For a complete history of updates, visit the changelog

10 Likes
3

Great stuff! Thanks for getting this out so sharply after 13 shipped. It looks like a lot of work, which is much appreciated.