Drafts 4 is a Superior Notes App for Apple Watch
Many Apple Watch users have decried the lack of a built-in Notes app on the Apple Watch. Drafts 4 is much more than the missing Notes app, it’s a powerful app with a whole host of features for all of your devices.
Christine gave Drafts 4 a thorough review on our sister site, AppAdvice. I’d definitely recommend reading it to get an idea of what the app can do, although it’s has been updated many times since its release and is even better now. It made our recent list of favorite text editor apps as well. Drafts 4 isn’t a simple notes app at all; it’s an app that you can use for anything from grocery lists to writing the next great novel.
But I’m here to talk about Apple Watch apps, so I’ll focus on the scaled down but quite useful version of Drafts 4 on the Apple Watch. It does have a complication, but only for the smaller, circular spot or the longer one across the bottom of faces like Mickey or Utility, not the large center spot of the Modular face. Either complication will show you how many notes you have in the app. It does have a Glance now, and it will be possible to put it in your Dock once you’re on watchOS 3.
When you open the app, you’ll be taken to a Capture screen. Tap the word Capture and dictate your note. Even if you don’t tap it, you’ll still be taken to dictation mode after a couple of seconds. I found voice recognition to be flawless here. Even when it heard me wrong, it corrected itself immediately. Tap Done when you’re finished, and you’ll be taken back to the Capture screen. There you’ll see Inbox: X at the top of the screen, reflecting the number of notes you have.
A tap to the word Inbox takes you to your list of notes. Tap on an individual note to see it in its entirety. Force press the note to bring up a menu: Archive, Trash, Prepend, Append. Tapping Archive or Trash does what you’d expect. Prepend allows you to add to the note at the beginning. Append allows you to add to the note at the end.
Everything you do in Drafts 4 on the Apple Watch will be reflected in the iPhone version of the app and vice versa. Overall, the app is quite snappy, though the syncing between the iPhone and the Apple Watch isn’t instantaneous. It takes a minute, but it works.
If you want a dead simple notes app, you might be better off with the far cheaper WatchNotes. You also might prefer Evernote if you want a free (or more accurately, “freemium”) cross-platform notes app. But if you’re interested in a more powerful notes app which is much more, you’ll want to purchase Drafts 4 on the App Store for $9.99. The price may seem steep, but unlike other apps, there are no in-app purchases or subscriptions you have to buy to access all of its features.
