Share Extension

Drafts 4 ships with an iOS 8 Share extension which allows easy capture of text of almost any app which supports the native iOS 8 share sheet. If you are not familiar with Share extensions and configuring the Share menu, it would be good to start with a basic guide on how to use extensions.

Using the Share Extension in Apps

The Drafts Share extensions registers itself to accept text and URLs. Any app which provides shares text and/or URLs via an system sharing sheet will allow you to capture text to Drafts if you have enabled the Drafts Share extension.

To use the Share extension, look for the system share icon or a "Share" button. Not all apps provide access to the system share sheet, and the way it is presented varies from app to app, so you may have to look around to find the right option.

Once you select share, the Drafts extension will appear with the app icon.  If Drafts is installed and the share extension is not visible, swipe all the way to the left and select the "More" button to enable the extension – this only needs to be done once.

Tap the Drafts icon in the Share sheet to open the extension.  The extension will popup pre-filled with text.  The text can be editing directly in the extension if desired.  Tap "Capture" to complete the process, or "Cancel" to exit without saving the text.

The next time you launch Drafts, any texts captured with the extension will be imported into your Drafts inbox and can be edited or acted upon like any other draft.

Using the Share Extension with Safari

Safari offers special integration options for Share extensions, which Drafts takes advantage of by scanning the webpage for details before presenting the Share extension.

Accessing the Share extension is the same as in any other app, but Drafts will pre-filled the Share extension text with some information about the web page being viewed.  Specifically, Drafts will capture the page title, the URL of the page and any text selection if there was one present when "Share" was selected.

If you would like to customize the way Drafts captures information when used in Safari, you can edit the "Web Capture Template" in Drafts settings to alter the arrangement of the tags and add additional text/formatting you wish to include when capturing web pages.

Appending and Prepending

In addition to capturing new drafts with the Share extension, Drafts can append or prepend the captured text to existing drafts in your inbox.  Just tap the "Prepend" or "Append" buttons at the bottom of the capture dialog, then select a draft from the list.