Draft Announcements: Team Folders, Import/Export updates, and NaNoWriMo support.
Happy Halloween!
I’ve got some fun Draft things to announce. Two big areas of focus were improving collaboration and providing more tools to help people use folders, especially for National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo, which starts tomorrow). Here we go:
Team Folders #
You can now share an entire folder with collaborators. Just look for the share buttons next to your folders:
Share a folder with a list of email addresses or grab a link to send to whomever you want.
What’s great about these Team Folders is that you don’t have to send around Share links anymore to the documents inside. Your collaborators sharing a folder will automatically get updates of your documents or any new documents you create. You’ll get their new documents as well. Any edits they make to your documents will automatically be set up so you can approve or reject their changes. They also can’t delete your copies; your collaborators are working, editing, deleting their own versions.
Team Folders have all sorts of additional helpful things. For example, you can create discussion threads with the entire team of people sharing the folder.
Everyone in the group will be alerted via email. Any replies to those emails end up back in the discussion thread of that team. Also, if you want to silence a particular discussion thread you can do that too:
When you are working on a document in a Team Folder, you now have access to message anyone on your team about that document. Pop open the notes view in edit mode of your document, and you can pick anyone in the team to make sure they’re emailed the note on the document:
Imports #
I’ve updated the import functionality of Draft quite a bit. You can now import multiple files at one time from your computer or places in the cloud like Dropbox:
It’s great for importing the chapters of your book.
You can also import your files directly into a folder:
If you are pulling from a cloud location like Dropbox, the whole group of files are still auto-synced as usual. This is a fantastic way to quickly link a bunch of items in Draft and Dropbox.
And, you don’t even have to click the Import button anymore. You can just drag files from your computer to the browser window with Draft, and Draft will pull in those files.
Exports #
Using Folders is great for organizing chapters of a book. So now, you can export an entire folder as a single document for Word/Google Docs, PDF, Kindle, or ePub. Write a book in Draft and easily export it to wherever you need it to be.
Beeminder Integration #
Beeminder is a popular application that helps you stick to your goals. One of its novel features is that you can create contracts where, if you veer from your goal, you’re charged money. It’s proven to be an effective way of helping people commit.
Today, Beeminder has a special feature setup to record your Draft writing sessions.
https://www.beeminder.com/draft
Using the Draft API, Beeminder, with your permission, can record how many words you add or edit in your daily writing sessions, and give you even more encouragement to meet your writing goals. If you need that extra motivation each day, especially for say, a NaNoWriMo goal, this is a great tool. And it doesn’t cost a thing unless you want to start setting up those payment contracts with yourself.
Firefox on Windows #
Firefox on Windows has been a quirky place to use Draft, with some occasional slowness and interface bugs. I’ve made some changes here that resolve all the things people were having trouble with.
I hope you are having a great week. Thank you for helping continue to make mine awesome. I’ve really enjoyed building Draft and supporting our efforts to write more and write better.
If I can be helpful in any way, please feel free to ask me anything. You know where to find me:
https://twitter.com/natekontny
Or the official Draft Twitter account: