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Drafts is where text starts on iOS. It's a powerful application that allows you to quickly capture what's on your mind, then process and send that text just about anywhere on iOS. Version 5 of Drafts was released recently, bringing many new features and a revamp of the user interface.

In this first tutorial, Mike shows you how to get up and running with Drafts 5 by walking you through the interface and demoing several of the built-in actions included with the free version. He also explains how to modify and edit custom Actions (Pro feature), walks you through the different Modes and Settings, and goes over using the Messages and Apple Watch apps.

Apple gives you some very powerful presentation tools with Keynote, but if you just need to create a great looking presentation quickly the power of Keynote can be overkill. This is where an application like Deckset can really save you a lot of time.

Deckset is a beautiful and easy to use Markdown-based presentation application for Mac. It takes a simple Markdown document and makes it look like you spent a ton of time creating a killer presentation. With just a few links of plain text, Deckset can create amazing looking slides that will make your next presentation remarkable.

In this episode, Mike shows you the ins and outs of Deckset by creating a sample presentation.

Tip Video - Following on from our recent tutorials on Bear & Ulysses, I take a look at previewing Markdown formatted files with Marked 2.

Bear is the new kid on the block as far as plain text editing on the Mac, iPad and iPhone is concerned.

Despite being a committed Ulyssess and Scrivener user, my interest was piqued by the glowing reviews and the fact that Bear was selected as "App of the Year" 2016 by Apple.

After using Bear for a couple of weeks (and the fact that I received many requests), I decided that it would be remiss of me not to cover Bear on ScreenCastsOnline - it really is a beautiful app!

However, there is one aspect of the app that may not sit well with some people, and that's to enable syncing between devices (and to switch on some other functionality), you need to upgrade to Bear Pro, which just happens to be a subscription service.

Consequently, in this tutorial, I focus mainly on the features in the free version, but still take a look at the Bear Pro options.

Well worth taking a look!

Ulysses is a fantastic plain text editor for the Mac, iPad and iPhone. It allows you to create plain text documents or “sheets” and use markdown formatting to control the final look and format of your writing. PDF, ePub, HTML, Text, DOCX and even publishing to Medium are all included in this great app, giving you ultimate control of your writing.

As well as a wealth of formatting and exporting capabilities, Ulysses takes away the pain of managing your documents across all your devices. All your sheets are contained in a single Ulysses library, that syncs amazingly well with iCloud. It will even allow you to edit external files from a multitude of sources.

Please note that Ulysses has moved to a subscription service as of August 2017

Ulysses is a fantastic text editor for the Mac, iPad and iPhone. It allows you to create plain text documents or “sheets” and use markdown formatting to control the styling of your documents, allowing you to export them in a multitude of formats. 

It's really simple to export to PDF, ePub, HTML, Text, DOCX and even publish direct to Medium from the Mac, iPad or iPhone. 

As well as the wealth of formatting and exporting capabilities, Ulysses takes away the pain of managing your documents across all your devices. All your sheets are contained in a single Ulysses library, that syncs amazingly well with iCloud. It will even allow you to edit external files from a multitude of sources.

This first episode focuses on the basic principles of Ulysses and we will follow up in the next episode with a look at some of its more advanced features.

Update: As of August 2017, Ulysses has changed to a subscription model.

Another double length show this week, packed with all sorts of information. The full, double length show is only available to ScreenCastsOnline Extra! members, the free version of the show is just the first 20 minutes or so.

This week’s show has a theme but covers lots of different tools and technologies - something for everybody!

The main theme of the show is Markdown - a simple formatting language that allows you to use plain text files for all your writing on your Mac, iPad or iPhone. As it’s based on pure text files, Markdown gives you complete freedom and flexibility in the way you create documents and in the way you can share them with colleagues, family and friends.