Daniel Details How to Use Drafts and Workflow for iOS

Daniel Wallace:

If you liked my post about blogging on an iPad, and the best writing programs available on the iOS App Store, here’s a little more.

In my first post, I assumed that you were writing an essay-type post, full of big ideas, in which prose came first, and the links and quotations came second. First you wrote, and then, when you had finished writing, you went back and cleaned up the piece, got it ready for the web.

That’s why I began the piece talking about writing apps on the iPad, great programs like Ulysses and Drafts.

But, of course, not all blogging is like that. Sometimes we are responding to another person’s post, or want to connect a few different arguments; sometimes we just want to fire off a quick piece that’s nothing more than a link, a quotation, and a comment.

In theory, these sorts of posts would be a slog to compose on an iPad. You’ve got to select text on a web page, copy it into your text editor, go back, select links, copy them over, HTML or Markdown those links up, and then send the post to your blog. It’s a lot of bother for a quick response. But with the new capacities of iOS9, the best iPad (and iPhone) apps are getting better and better at speeding up the process for you.

Why should a short post take you a long time to write, when it doesn’t have to?

I’ve been meaning to incorporate the excellent Drafts for iOS [App Store] into my workflow for over a year now, for more automation. Daniel’s post, which details how he uses Drafts, has given me an excellent idea — to expand my workflow even more, to publish linked or regular posts, with quotes from the clipboard or Drafts, and mash it up all together in Workflow [App Store], without leaving Safari.

Hopefully my plan will be actually possible to execute…