Draft Announcements: Presentations; publishing to Basecamp, Svbtle and Ghost; and Minor revisions
Happy New Year! Here are a few new things in Draft I think you’ll find handy:
Draft Presentations #
I needed to create a presentation the other day, but found it was strange I was reaching for heavy feature-laden apps like Keynote or Powerpoint to simply display some big text on the screen. Why do I have to click so much to create new slides, when really I just have 12 bullet points I’d like to outline and be done with the presentation? Not to mention - it’s extremely difficult to version control and collaborate on a presentation.
So I added a way in Draft to create a super simple presentation.
Separate each slide in your Draft document with at least three hyphens (or asterisks).
When you view your document, it’s now a presentation. Use CMD or CTRL (on Windows) + R to toggle back and forth from edit to presentation mode
You can share your document to get edits, or choose Read Only mode to share the document just as a presentation.
You can use *italics* if you need a little decoration in your slides. Links and code formatting work well too.
It’s just a simple presentation tool, inspired and powered by Tom MacWright’s Big.
If you’d like to see it in action, here’s a demo.
Publish to Basecamp, Svbtle, and Ghost #
I want to continue making a Draft a great place to write, and publish to all those places we need our writing. So I’ve upgraded Draft’s Places to Publish with three popular requests: Basecamp, Svbtle, and Ghost.
Setup is found in Settings → Places to Publish:
After you setup a service like Basecamp for publishing, you’ll now find it in the Publish button, to the left of your documents in Edit and View modes:
Basecamp will even remember the last project you published to make selecting it in the future easier. I’ve also added some smarts to the Publish button’s ordering to help make it quicker to publish to the most often used places.
I’m testing something new with these three services: re-publishing. If you publish the same document to either of these services a second time, the original publication will be updated. So publish to Basecamp, then make changes in Draft, and publish again to get those new changes back over to Basecamp.
Minor Revisions #
From day one, Draft has allowed you to save major revisions of your writing while auto-saving the master copy. That way you don’t have to sort through the arbitrary cruft other products collect.
However, I’ve heard from you when this went astray. One example was a Draft user falling asleep at his computer and his head hit the keyboard, involuntarily wiping out a large section of his Draft document. Fortunately, I was able to manually retrieve a backed up copy of his work.
Even though this particular example is rare, people still found themselves inadvertently losing work if they hadn’t manually saved a major revision and accidentally removed large chunks of work that then auto-saved. I didn’t want this type of thing to happen again.
So Draft now has two types of revisions: Major and Minor. Major revisions are just like before. Whenever you want, you manually use the menu or the keyboard shortcut to mark a major revision of your work (Mark Draft).
Minor revisions, though, are being recorded for you automatically while you write.
To keep all these extra revisions from muddying up your ability to find things, minor revisions are hidden unless you explicitly ask for them. If you go into the drafts of a document you are working on:
You’ll still see your major revisions there. But now there is a menu option to reveal the minor revisions that were auto-saved:
Click “Show Minor” and you’ll have much more material that Draft has backed up for you in case you need to retrieve it. I hope this proves a handy and yet clutter free way to manage and find old work.
Thank you for all the continued support #
Draft has been on quite a roll, now serving up over a quarter of a million documents, and winning some really nice praise (for example a 5 star review at Macworld).
I can’t do this without all the support you’ve given. It means a lot to me. I hope you know that. And I hope you are having an awesome New Year!
Please stay tuned, I’ve got some really fun things coming up :) I’m always here if you need anything.
-Nate
https://twitter.com/natekontny
Or the official Draft Twitter account: