

Draft (YC S11) Is The Best Word Processor You Can Write With Today - joshualastdon
http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/12/draft-is-the-best-word-processor-you-can-write-with-today/

======
metaxy2
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
That is pretty cool. Thanks for mentioning that project. I'll have to take a
deeper look.

------
rubberbandage
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
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
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
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
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
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
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...](https://draftin.com/documents/5606?token=SWh7LSoED_pnCwLtgJRbi3ERvJX84y6rL9CflnyO9oI)

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

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

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

