This week I'm welcoming a new sponsor to the site, Drafts. With the emergence of mobile computing, we are still figuring out exactly how to make these pocketable devices work for us. Drafts is one of those applications that just bangs you over the head with its obvious utility.

At its most basic level Drafts is an app that presents you with a blank screen and a keyboard every time you open it. Think about that for moment. When you are meeting a person or something brilliant occurs to you, there will be no friction between your brain and writing it down. There is no fiddling with the new file buttons or file naming. Just you and the cursor. Tap the drafts icon and start writing (or dictating through Siri). Drafts sits on the far right of my iPhone and iPad dock. I pop in there multiple times a day to capture ideas. This alone would make Drafts worth the price of admission but there is more.

Developer Greg Pierce has made Drafts one of the leaders of inter-app communications on iOS. Drafts is loaded with tools for you to easily do things with those bits of text right from the app. I can send them to emails and text messages but even this function goes deeper than you’d expect. You can set up common recipients and route texts or emails without any further work. For example, I’ve got a group of friends that have a Drafts texting action. I can dictate a message into Drafts, push a button, and send the text to everyone in that group. That is a simple example though. I could also send text to OmniFocus, process it in Markdown, create a calendar entry, send to Day One (my diary app), send to Byword, or process in Tweetbot. The interactions with Dropbox, Evernote, and Google Drive are just crazy. Also, your data will sync between your iPhone and iPad so you can capture on one device and process on another. I use the badge trick to make sure I process all my drafts every day.

Drafts has become one of my most important apps. It helps me get through the day and I'm privileged to have it as a sponsor. If you haven’t tried Drafts yet, you owe it to yourself. Head over to their website and check it out.

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