Drafts 4 is a paid upgrade to the excellent Drafts app (which was on version 3.x before iOS 8). Drafts has long been famous for its lightning fast load times and excellent set of built-in actions for sharing text with other apps and services. For text nerds frustrated with the siloed nature of iOS apps, Drafts has always been a breath of fresh air.
Version 4 was rebuilt from the ground up, and even though the interface is still quite familiar, there are all sorts of little signs of polish that make the upgrade feel worth it:
- The clean, sleek icon with a flash of blue is a definite improvement. The precious icon for iOS 7 just felt flat and dry, whereas the current icon has a bit more personality and looks more unique.
- Animations within the app are now consistent across the iPhone and iPad versions, but they can feel a little too slippery. Deleting drafts and actions is actually a little difficult because you need to wait for the animation to finish before you can act.
- Markdown now shows with live previews as you type
- Drafts 4 uses iCloud for syncing files across the iPad and iPhone. I find this a welcome change because, as fast as Simperium (the previous sync engine) was, there were significant glitches with the system. It’s too early to tell how iCloud will fare in its place, but I’m optimistic.
I don’t regret my impulsive $5 purchase of Drafts 4 one bit. Drafts is a wonderfully powerful app for iPad power users; it can get quick notes into Evernote so much faster than the official app, and that alone is worth the price of purchase in my book.
© Thomas for iPad Insight, 2014. |
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