Drafts Gets a Price Drop, Tip Jar and New iOS 10 Features

The first big thing about Drafts is the new price drop from $9.99 to $4.99, making it much more accessible to new users. Those who are already using Drafts get today’s update for free.

However, as continued development costs money, Drafts now has a Tip Jar right in the app’s settings, where you can chip in however much you want in order to support Agile Tortoise in future development of the app. If you prefer to contribute but not give Apple 30 percent of the tip, you can also use Square Cash to send money to the developer directly.

Even though the main focus of the 4.7 update is to give Drafts some awesome new iOS 10-only features, the app is still compatible with iOS 9. This means that you can have Drafts 4.7 running on an iOS 9 and iOS 10 device separately, but for the best experience, it’s recommended to update to iOS 10 around the same time.

In iOS 10, Apple has added speech recognition APIs that developers can take advantage of, and that’s just what the new update to Drafts brings.

While Drafts has always had Siri dictation support through the microphone key on the iOS keyboard, it’s been vastly improved thanks to the new APIs. Now there is a new dictation interface in Drafts that can be accessed in several different ways, and it supports any language or locale that is supported by Siri dictation. The language can also be changed on-the-fly with a single dictation session if necessary.

Drafts now includes an app to go alongside iMessage. With this, users are allowed to insert text from the inbox or flagged drafts directly into a Messages conversation. There are no attribution or links visible, so it’s seamless.

For those of you who prefer to use OneDrive for storing your documents and data, Drafts now supports sending your drafts to Microsoft’s OneDrive service. It works similarly to the existing support for Dropbox, Google Drive, and iCloud Drive. Additionally, the OneDrive action steps are fully able to be turned into templates, so you can create, replace, append, and prepend to any files that already exist in your OneDrive account.

There will be some pre-configured OneDrive actions, but you can also try out the Save to OneDrive and OneDrive-Append to Journal workflows. More documentation regarding OneDrive support can be found here.

The update also includes a brand new, rebuilt Share Extension. The functionality of the new extension is similar to previous releases, but is now much faster and better integrated with under-the-hood improvements. A big new addition is the ability to append or prepend to flagged drafts, as well as drafts in the inbox.

Agile Tortoise has reworked the Drafts’ Today widget into the new iOS 10 widget format. This means that the widget is now available from the home screen on 3D Touch devices, so it’s even faster to create drafts.

The Apple Watch app has also been updated to take advantage of the watchOS 3.0 experience. The interface has been simplified, there are now ways to get to the advanced capture options from the main screen, including taking notes from watchOS 3.0’s scribble input. The archive, trash, append, and prepend options now show up as buttons, so they’re no longer hidden behind Force Touch.

We just went over the biggest changes in the Drafts 4.7 update, but that’s not all. There are many other fixes that make the overall experience better. Here’s the change log for everything else:

Drafts has remained a top choice here at AppAdvice for all of our quick note-taking needs, and we are glad to see the developer continue to improve it for each new iOS iteration. Version 4.7 of Drafts brings some nice improvements and shiny new features that are made possible with iOS 10, so if you haven’t tried it out yet, there’s no better time than now, especially with the great new price drop.

Drafts is a universal download on the App Store for $4.99. This hefty update is free for existing customers.