Draft (YC S11) Is The Best Word Processor You Can Write With Today

Draft (YC S11) Is The Best Word Processor You Can Write With Today(techcrunch.com)

65 points by joshualastdon 13 years ago | 13 comments

metaxy2 13 years ago |

The "ask a professional" feature is really cool. A couple of years ago some MIT students came out with a plugin for Word called Soylent [1]. It's the same basic idea, except it's backed by Mechanical Turk instead of a team of professional editors. Turkers suggest small changes and the changes are voted in or out of the final draft by other turkers. Pretty cool stuff.

[1] http://projects.csail.mit.edu/soylent/

nate 13 years ago | |

That is pretty cool. Thanks for mentioning that project. I'll have to take a deeper look.

rubberbandage 13 years ago |

Very similar UI to ia Writer [1], which I really enjoy — as someone who easily gets caught up in the minutiae of choosing fonts/sizes/linespacing etc. and thus never starts, you know, actually writing, it’s actually sometimes great to have a program with preset attributes that you can’t tweak. Adding git-like versioning is an awesome addition, I’m looking forward to playing (and maybe writing!) with this.

[1] http://www.iawriter.com/mac/

bengillies 13 years ago |

Very cool. I really like the simple approach and feel there's a _lot_ of mileage in it. However, a couple of questions/points:

1: How do I give my documents a title? 2: Does it support Markdown/how do I link to stuff? 3: The home button doesn't appear to work on an iPad

I may very well have missed something (I haven't published anything yet and didn't search too hard for instructions (it didn't seem to need any)) but thought I'd ask anyway in the hope that they prove useful.

nate 13 years ago | |

1: If you are editing the document, hover over the home icon, there's a "name this document" link. Or. you can use markdown for titling things.

2. So yes. Markdown is supported.

3. Ah, sorry, the home button uses hover states. I never intended for much iPad use yet, but it seems like it's getting some good use there. I'll fix that soon.

bengillies 13 years ago | | |

Cool, thanks for the rapid reply. For the record, most of the interface seems to look and work just fine on an iPad. Keep up the good work.

philip1209 13 years ago |

While it does not fit everybody's needs and technical abilities, I have found that writing in markdown with Git version control has proven to be the best way to manage drafts. Other writers can submit pull requests, and when combined with a simple publishing platform like Jekyll it is easy to visualize final results.

boyter 13 years ago |

Somewhat similar (more polished) to a big ass text file editor I wrote and open sourced a while ago, https://github.com/boyter/BATF http://searchco.de/blog/view/batf-big-arse-text-file which I do admit to using pretty much every day.

I had always suspected that there was a business in creating something like this for the masses but never bothered to implement it myself.

hu_me 13 years ago |

Its very nicely done. love that i can just signup and write. didnt find a demo to try before sign up. which would definitely help.

here is a doc I wrote if some wants to check it out quickly https://draftin.com/documents/5606?token=SWh7LSoED_pnCwLtgJR...

freehunter 13 years ago | |

A demo would be nice, agreed. I see your document and it looks nice, but I'd love to play around with the tool before signing up.

lowglow 13 years ago |

I wonder if github could do this pretty simply for gists while using the zen mode enabled on comments: https://github.com/blog/1379-zen-writing-mode

ebun 13 years ago |

Cool app. The UI reminds me of 750words.com.

However, I was surprised not to receive a welcome email after signing up.

Maro 13 years ago |

This is very cool, but I use Evernote for this sort of writing.