Tag Archives: tool

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”

FontFont your BlogBlog – try custom fonts before you buy

I have never learned to tweak CSS (and I am sure it is a lot of fun!). And having to rely on a generic “off the shelf” blog design always lies heavy on my conscience. Luckily, the guys from FontShop have come up with a genius web tool called FontFonter to make me see the light and finally do something about it. This is a great product experience as well as a brilliant sales tool. Go on and quickly discover a better look for any site at http://fontfonter.com . And make sure to try the Meta typeface.

FontFonter version of this blog

FontFonter version of this blog

(Disclosure: I used to be an employee of MetaDesign in Berlin, so I basically ate Meta morning, noon and night. And our presentations and wireframes were built in InDesign and not Powerpoint or Omnigraffle. But that’s another story.)

NAB: It is an opportunity

Last night I was judging on the latest round of Creative Showcase submissions. Since on this particular night I suspect there were mostly judges on the sites, I cannot help but thinking that UGC always brings out the best in us. Please note the cloud at the right top.

I can feel the opportunity coming on

I can feel the opportunity coming on

I really like the concept (go to the “NAB community” website here), and I am sure NAB can chuckle about this (right?), and I am wondering what other ways (image recognition, manual screening, user flagging, NASA tools) one could use to automate the decency/brand fit of what goes on. Any ideas?

Added information:
I testify I was NOT involved in that doodle except for taking a screenshot. And if I did feel the urge for male genital depiction, I would go to Poke’s awesome Cock-A-Doodle .

Added information 2:
I now understand that the app erases all graphics after a certain amount of time.