Drafts 3.0 adds draft and action management, much more

Drafts, the iOS note-taker from Agile Tortoise, has been updated to version 3.0, and it's a big one. Drafts 3.0 is available now for the iPad (US$3.99) and iPhone ($2.99), and it's a free update for existing users.

Much like Apple's own Notes, Drafts lets you quickly jot things down (we recently featured Drafts as a Daily iPhone App) But it's so much more than that. Use Drafts to create "actions" for moving your text into other apps, or sharing with family, friends or co-workers. You can even geek out and create complex workflows that interact with other apps. Drafts can be as simple or involved as you like. In both scenarios, it's fast and useful.

There's a lot to like and play with in this release; so much so, in fact, that I'm going to pore over it a bit more for a full review soon. In the meantime, here's an overview of what to expect from Drafts 3.0.

This update adds draft management and action management. The new action manager gives you four customizable panes of actions -- ways of interacting with other iOS apps or web services.

You needn't scroll a long list to find the actions you want. You could, for example, have sharing actions on one pane (Twitter, ADN, Facebook or email), productivity actions on another (OmniFocus, Reminders and Fantastical) and writing-based actions on a third, like Markdown and send to Byword.

Draft management works in a similar way. The scrolling list is replaced with an inbox, an archive and a list of pinned drafts. Swipe any draft to pin it, archive it or move it back to the inbox. It's a seemingly simple change but it goes a long way to keeping things organized.

There's fun new geeky stuff, too. New Evernote actions let you create/append/prepend to notes in Evernote. It can process notes in Markdown now, too. Integration with Apple's Reminders has also been improved. You can now opt to import reminders right into Drafts, which is handy. You can also use an action to create new reminders or even start new lists in Reminders if a list does not yet exist. Super handy.

Additionally, if you use TextExpander, your saved snippets can now be expanded when you run a custom Drafts action. The iPhone version of the app features an extended keyboard.

There's a lot more in there -- this is a huge release. Drafts is a handy, useful tool for the iPhone and iPad. Version 3.0 makes it so much better. Keep an eye out for my in-depth review soon.