On your iPhone or iPad, I bet you’re using a note taking app like Simplenote, PlainText or Writings to organize your notes and have them backed up online. There are hundreds of alternative note-taking applications available in the App Store, and I’m not going to pretend I haven’t thought about trying a different one each week at least a couple of times. They all look so attractive. But I sticked with Writings, in the end. Still, aside from those users who are firmly convinced Apple’s own Notes app is the best you can have on the iOS platform no matter what, the note-taking app genre is strong and alive in the App Store.
Draftpad, developed by Manabu Ueno, might look like yet another take on mobile note capturing, but it’s not. Indeed it is a notepad that lets you jot down quick notes and thoughts, but it hasn’t got built-in online sync nor any other tagging or folder management capability. Instead, Draftpad is all about doing stuff with the text you just wrote. This app can “route” text to a plethora of external native / 3rd party apps, like Apple’s SMS app or Facebook. You can write text and then share it via email or Twitter, search on Google, add it as a Calendar event or make it the body text of a new SMS, send it to Facebook or search in Maps. The “assist library” (the commands you can perform on text) can be extended and you can even write your own actions if you know how to play around with custom URI handlers.
Draftpad comes with a bunch of non-app related actions, too, like “insert timestamp” or “copy all text”. There’s also the possibility to switch to a black theme and check on your previous notes by tapping on the History button in the main page. What I really like, though, is that the app comes with support for multiple Twitter clients out of the box, and if you know how to find your way around iOS you can make Draftpad work with any app that supports text input. It’s really neat. And all of this for free, both for iPhone and iPad.
Draftpad won’t become your new Simplenote but it’s a great addition to iOS – a notepad that’s customizable and you can extend to work with your favorite apps. This is exactly what I’d like to see in a “Services” menu in iOS 5.
