New Word Processor Draft Lets You Focus on Your Writing

Inkling and Cityposh founder Nathan Kontny wants to help people write better. So he created Draft. Launching today, the online word processor does away with what Kontny calls the many inconvenient things that get in the way of good writing, such as complicated version control. Consequently, Draft provides distinct version control for multiple users. Thus, if you share a document, your master copy remains intact even when a collaborator makes changes. With Draft, no overwriting occurs and any modification stays on your collaborator's copy of the document until you accept it. Or, you can choose to ignore it.

Draft also has an “ask a professional” button that lets you send whatever you're working on to a team of copy editors who will suggest edits for a fee. Likewise, you can easily add in or disregard their changes. Another unique feature of Draft is its ability to capture “snapshots” of your work. Mark major revisions of your document with the “mark draft” button and compare different versions of your work side by side later on. Draft shows you what you added or removed and where using different colored highlights.

And if you have a lot of bits and pieces of writing scattered across your cloud services, Draft has got you covered, too. You can import your documents from Evernote, Box, Google Drive, and Dropbox, and edit and share them with your friends on Draft. For instance, if you get a blog idea while outside, you can begin writing the post on Evernote and complete it on Draft when you get home. Whatever you do to the document is automatically synced back to the cloud account you imported it from.

Draft was beta tested by more than 1,500 people prior to launch. According to Kontny, he has more ideas in mind for the word processor but wanted to start with a “simple, useful kernel”.