New Screencasts with David Sparks

We’ve launched two new screencasts today, both hosted by MacSparky himself - David Sparks.

The first is a walkthrough of creating your first action in Drafts - the second dives deeper on using Tags and Workspaces! Enjoy!

Creating an Action

New to Drafts or just trying to get oriented in Drafts 5? Walkthrough the creation of your first action.

Also available on YouTube

Tags and Workspaces

Dive deep into using tags and workspaces to keep your drafts organized.

Also available on YouTube

6 Likes

Just saw action to publish tags to iCloud Drive. How would it look different to publish to Evernote?

There is no scripting support for Evernote, so this could no be mimicked exactly for Evernote. It’s unique ENML storage format makes it quite a bit more complicated to support for a variety of tasks and so no scripting support has been provided - at least not yet.

This could be modified to use the app.queueAction(action, draft) method to queue a bunch of individual calls to other Evernote actions - or you can just filter the draft list, tap and hold select to select all, and use Operations > Run Action to run an Evernote action configured to save to the right Notebook in Evernote to accomplish similar effect.

Thanks Greg. The filter and batch action sounds more straight forward.

Excellent! Thank you!

These screencasts are very helpful! I am struggling to find use cases that are really compelling, but I “kind of” see where Drafts will fit in, especially with a macOS option. So, I’ll keep working with Drafts until it becomes indispensable! These screencasts and the great Drafts community continue to contribute to my learning. Thanks!

2 Likes

Me too… I see potential, but i work on making the app my own.

For me, the best feature of Drafts is the ability to minimize the time and distractions between having an idea and recording it. Then to tag it. Then to get it where it needs to go. It’s all about the execution.

4 Likes

I need to make that a habit - capture text by Drafts, Drafts, Drafts.

I notice that I use it more when it’s not tucked away into a folder.

I use Drafts for a lot of things, but one of the most useful is just as an electronic scratchpad.

Whenever I need someone’s name or contact information, I just fire up Drafts and hand them my phone. The mostly blank screen, blinking cursor and keyboard make it obvious what they should do, and then I know where I can find the information, whatever I intend to do with it.

When I need to jot something down myself, I don’t spend time thinking about where to put it (Notes? Reminders? Contacts? Calendar?). I just use Drafts – then I worry what to do with it when I have a moment. Appointments I can usually just send to Fantastical. Contacts I can send to Interact (though I used to use a clunky script I wrote myself that didn’t work as well).

Most of the time, in my case, everything else ends up in my notes file. That’s just a Dropbox folder where I stick everything I might need later, as individual text files. I have Drafts actions that turns the first line into a filename, and the second line into tags that go into the body of the note.

6 Likes

My personal success with Drafts mirrors others: use it for everything (and according to the book, it will be a habit in 3 weeks.) I have the Drafts app at the lower right corner of my phone so it’s literally under my thumb.

I use Evernote to store most everything that isn’t an email, message, or tweet. I also use “append to Evernote Journal” to make notes in which I want to connect an event to a day and find it easily in the future.

I guess the dictation in the special dictation screen in Drafts uses Siri’s functionality on my iPhone, it just seems more accurate than when I dictate into other apps.

Drafts makes it really easy to follow the GTD principle of getting it out of your head and recorded somewhere.

3 Likes