Hey everybody, did you miss me?
?  *crickets chirp*

Ok, I’ll take that as a yes.  Anyhow, we’ve been very busy on the access technology team lately. With meetings to attend, projects to complete, and IBTC tours to provide, I have found it increasingly necessary to pull together a portable toolbox that will help me make sure I don’t miss something critical, (or interesting). Calendars, to do lists, organizers, e-mail, and notetaking solutions are all required tools to keep me focused and working toward my ultimate goal… world domination… er.. no.. I meant assisting in the effort to expand non-visual access to technology.  

I like to have my stuff travel with me so that I can see what’s coming up no matter where I am, so the heart of my productivity toolbox is centered on my iOS devices.  Appointments, e-mails, tweets, notes, and lists of all shapes and sizes flow through my hands and by extension my iPhone, and iPad all day long. Often, there isn’t a lot of time available for getting things down, and I find that I am not as fast at browsing interfaces and programs as I need to be in order to stay current with the conversations going on around me. For this reason, I used to just open up notes and dump the information into the first document I found, with promises to myself to sort it all out later. Sorting these notes would often be tedious, and messy. It was difficult to find and manipulate the data that was in these notes, and I usually got frustrated, and would just leave it there instead of making sense of the mess.

As you can imagine, this did not go well for me. To this end, I started a quest a few months ago to find and use tools that would help me keep everything together on the go.  As this is a problem we all encounter, I plan to share the discoveries I’ve made in this process on seminar day this year at convention in the session on mobile productivity.

In the meantime however, by way of a teaser trailer, let me tell you about one of my all-time favorite productivity apps for iOS- Drafts by Agile Tortoise. Drafts is the Swiss Army knife of text editors. I would heartily recommend it to any iOS user who regularly writes things down, it has a good mix of novice and advanced features that I believe make it an excellent tool for almost everyone. 

The Basics

Like Notes and many other text editors on the app store, Drafts allows the user to create, save and search notes.  It works well with dictation, Braille, onscreen and Bluetooth keyboard. All controls are labeled clearly. It offers support for links embedded within notes, (including those that iOS detects as calendar events and telephone numbers), and allows for global search.

For the geeks among us, it offers strong Markdown support. The writers will appreciate the clean interface, and word and character counts. The error prone will appreciate the ability to roll the document back to earlier versions, and for those of us in a hurry, it offers a nifty feature that allows the user to open a new document each time they launch the program, so we really can just start typing without having to worry about what is already in the file we’ve opened up. All in all, this makes Drafts a solid replacement for the stock Notes app, but for me at least, the best is yet undiscussed.

Bringing Order to Chaos

Sometimes, particularly when creating a grocery list, I just start to download my brain onto the page. Bread, chicken, peas, macaroni, pinapple, eggs, juice... This works, but as many of my readers know, shopping with an assistant is best tackled strategically. When possible, it makes sense to provide a grocery list that as much as possible matches the layout of the store in order to preserve our sanity (and the soles of our shoes). This is where the first of my favorite features of this app comes into play. When a user has collapsed the keyboard, they will find an option near the bottom of the screen called “arrange”. This puts the app into a mode where the user can delete or re-position any “paragraph” or “line” in the document. Each line will have a delete button preceding it, and a reordering button following it, so that if the user wants to remove an item, they can merely activate the “delete” button, or they can double tap and hold (sadly I can’t find a way to do this in Braille) the reorder button and slide the item up and down the screen. As it passes other lines the process of what is happening onscreen is described to the user, and order is maintained. I use this feature regularly, and am pleased with the implementation.

Customizable Quick Action Keys

The second feature that I find helpful in this app is the row of keys above the standard keyboard. It can be customized, (and programmed) to provide any number of single touch features. At present, some of my favorite additions to this keyboard are a set of parentheses which places my cursor between them, and a key that will automatically add the date and time to my file. The power of this row of keys is that it is fully customizable. For the truly adventurous, keys can be created using JavaScript, and for those with neither the skill nor inclination to program their own, a large directory of keys exist for the grabbing. This makes the app perfect for working on projects that require special formatting, and quite honestly it’s one that I have not used to its fullest potential. I’d love to hear how others choose to use it though.  

Actions

Finally, we come to the feature that I believe makes this app worth not only the price tag, but also its placement in one of the coveted spots on my dock, “Actions”. Actions are scripts or micro programs which allow a user to press a button, and do magic. All right, it’s not quite magic, but it is quite powerful. Each action allows a user to process text in a unique way. Remember that grocery list? Use the “List to Reminders” action to put it in the phone’s “Reminders” app so that each item can be ticked off as it’s picked up.  Want to post a message to Facebook and Twitter?  Write it once in Drafts, and use the “Twitter” and “Post to Facebook” actions, and the post will be sent off to both services. There are default actions for sending text to Google Drive, Dropbox, Evernote, and a number of other services. It is possible to also send text as e-mails, or text messages, or just copy it to the clipboard for later use.  

Like the keyboard shortcuts, a user can create their own actions, or browse a large collection of actions that can be installed to suit their own tastes. I find it invaluable.

Drafts is one of only a handful of apps I use every single day, and I would argue is worth every penny of its $9.99 price tag.