Open your last Draft article in your iOS text editor

Do you know Draft? It probably is the best collaboration service for writers. Hell, it may be the best online text editor out there. Don’t believe me? Then you gotta trust my good friend Matthew Guay. He wrote twice about Draft (here and here) and gave the best rating possible both times.

I have some ideas for articles while at work once in a while. It is a Windows PC, so my options narrow down to FocusWriter or Notepad++ and when I get some spare time I like to scribble these ideas to finish the article when I get home. I can’t just pull my iPhone and start typing or my boss will poke me; I also refuse to log on my Dropbox to sync the files afterwards. Using Draft I can write on the desktop and find all my files waiting for me home. But what if I want these articles in my iPhone while at work?

Draft has a nice REST API you can call with a python script using the requests module that comes with Pythonista:

from requests import get
from json import loads
from urllib import quote
from webbrowser import open

email = 'YOUR EMAIL'
password = 'YOUR PASSWORD'

r = get('https://draftin.com/api/v1/documents.json', auth=(email,password))

data = loads(r.content)

title = quote(data[0]['name'].encode('utf-8'))
article = quote(data[0]['content'].encode('utf-8'))

callback = 'onewriter://x-callback-url/create?name=' + title + '&text=' + article
#callback = 'byword://x-callback-url/new?name' + title + '&text=' + article

open(callback)

Add your login credentials to their respective fields and run the script. It will get your latest updated document in Draft and open it in 1Writer with a title and everything. If you use Byword, I commented a callback variable. Just uncomment it and comment the other.

Even if you don't plan to use this workflow, try Draft. It offers a myriad of features for collaborative writing and also professional editing services to take a look at your essay; or you may just use it to pull out that remarkable closing sentence for your article.