Category Archives: Uncategorized

Like writing? You’ll love Draft

As I like writing more and more (even though my background is more in design and UX) I love the Draft site (HT to Nic Hodges). It lets you focus on writing and nothing else. Interruptions from colleagues and clients excluded, no one can stop them.

Screen Shot 2013-03-28 at 10.20.05 AM

Draft documents can now easily be published to WordPress and Tumblr from inside Draft. Go to Settings -> Places to Publish. You’ll then get a Publish button next to your documents.

The rest below is about the new Chrome extension, actually a direct copy+paste from the creative developer Nate Kontny (his site Ninja and Robots) in Chicago, who is behind Draft:

“Bookmarklets and browser extensions like Instapaper, Evernote’s Clearly, and Readability make reading anything on the web simple, focused, and gorgeous. Why can’t writing be that way?

So here’s a Chrome extension that lets you.

Any webpage that you can write on, you can now use Draft with. Your blog, Gmail, Twitter, Facebook, even comment boxes on websites like Reddit and Hacker News.

Just place your cursor in the box you want to write in, click the Chrome Draft extension, and Draft will open up in a new Chrome Tab. Choose an already written document or something new to write in Draft (any text from the original text box will carry over).

When you’re done, there’s a menu button to paste your work back into the text box you came from.

All of a sudden, everything you write everywhere is focused, versioned, and able to be shared with friends for help before you publish. I hope you like it. This might be the handiest and neatest thing I’ve ever made. :)

Click here to access the Draft Chrome extension.

I’ve also open sourced the Chrome extension in case anyone wants to make it better or start similar projects for Firefox and Safari.

Finally, the past couple weeks I’ve improved a lot of other things. For example:

Google Drive syncing is a lot better.
Draft is much more usable now on narrow devices like iPads in landscape mode.
There is a CTRL+r/CMD+r shortcut to switch between edit and view modes.
It’s been a really exciting couple weeks since I launched Draft. The feedback and support have been incredible. Thank you so much for the help, the criticism, and the motivation.

Stay tuned. Draft has so much more in store to help us become better writers. I’m just getting started.

-Nate”

Skatebacks prettify your iPhone

Crafted from the waste material created during skateboard manufacturing, Grove SkateBacks have a certain ‘Paul Smith’ whiff about them.

I am seriously considering their colourful stripes (they also come in a toned down colour way) for my current iPhone. But then again, the new iPhone 5 might be coming out soon and have a slightly different shape…

Anyone not ready to upgrade ? I hear Samsung’s Android phones are getting better by the day. But if you caught fire, you can add some street-cred and shredding personality to the rear of your iPhone for about $50 (US). They are made from 100% post-industrial skate board material, and attach to your iPhone 4 or 4S via a peel-and-stick 3M adhesive that promises to allow for residue-free removal.

via

Occupy George Washington and Fat Abraham Lincoln

Compare this ingenious ‘print on dollars’ protest campaign by Occupy George

Red Washington

Red Washington

with this work by Ogilvy Thailand for a ‘best exchange rate in town’ ad. I reckon one could easily mistake the second for a political ad as well.

Fat Lincoln

Fat Lizzie

Fat Lizzie

The 10 Most Powerful Facebookers

I stumbled upon this list of the 10 most powerful Facebookers (apart from Zuckerberg naturally). The funny thing is, you can almost guess their roles, just by looking at their appearance. Give it a go on this little Bingo table I prepared earlier for Adverblog:

The cheat sheet is here by the way.

A race of “Like” across facebook – Melbourne Cup 2010

The Melbourne Cup is being held for the 150th time this year and is often described as “the race that stops the nation”. In 2010 it seems to live up to its moniker with torrential rain flooding Victoria’s capital.

But it also signals the beginning of spring, and for us at Holler it meant a fresh idea for how to best transfer a horse race onto facebook.

Greatest Cup Never Run on facebook

Greatest Cup Never Run on facebook

Check out Boag’s Draught’s “Greatest Cup Never Run” and click on Photofinish. Here you can Like any of the 24 best horses of all time. Besides engaging with other horse experts on the walls of Longfacebook, you will see how their race for some facebook love pans out. Currently the top two, legendary horses Makybe Diva and Phar Lap, are separated by nothing more than a single Like.

Greatest Cup Never Run - Longfacebook

Greatest Cup Never Run - Longfacebook