What you need to know
- Drafts for Mac now has support for actions.
- Actions can work with other apps or services.
- Many iOS and iPad actions are compatible with the Mac app.
Drafts, the excellent text capturing app, is already available for iPhone, iPad, and Mac. There's even an Apple Watch version, too. But the Mac app is the one we're interested in today with a new update adding support for actions. Now, Drafts for Mac can work with third-party apps as well as services, too.
Actions have been a big deal for Drafts on iPhone and iPad for years. They allows users to put text into Drafts and then have it actioned in a variety of different ways. That could be something simple like sending it as an iMessage or email. Or it could be something that adds specific formatting, sends it to another app, and then returns to Drafts before doing something completely different with it. Actions can be as simple or as complicated as you like and there's an online catalog of them waiting to be tried out.
Now, the Mac app can take advantage of many of these actions for the first time. That completely changes the game and makes Drafts even more useful than it already was.
The update adds other changes along the lines of new window behaviors and the ability to filter drafts by tag. But without doubt the big change is actions, and it's going to change the way I work for the better.
For more information on the changes and what it could mean for your workflow, MacStories has a wonderful deep dive into the update. Be sure to check it out.
Oliver Haslam has written about Apple and the wider technology business for more than a decade with bylines on How-To Geek, PC Mag, iDownloadBlog, and many more. He has also been published in print for Macworld, including cover stories. At iMore, Oliver is involved in daily news coverage and, not being short of opinions, has been known to 'explain' those thoughts in more detail, too.
Having grown up using PCs and spending far too much money on graphics card and flashy RAM, Oliver switched to the Mac with a G5 iMac and hasn't looked back. Since then he's seen the growth of the smartphone world, backed by iPhone, and new product categories come and go. Current expertise includes iOS, macOS, streaming services, and pretty much anything that has a battery or plugs into a wall. Oliver also covers mobile gaming for iMore, with Apple Arcade a particular focus. He's been gaming since the Atari 2600 days and still struggles to comprehend the fact he can play console quality titles on his pocket computer.
