Once upon a time there was a text editor named Notepad. Notepad was a very nice, decent and well-behaved text editor. It wasn’t fancy, and didn’t have crazy amounts of menus or toolbars; just a few simple but essential features like Undo, Save and Copy/Paste.
All too soon, people began to tire of Notepad. It didn’t have enough formatting options, it’s feature set was too limited and the font was hard on the eyes. So Bill Gates invented Microsoft Word.
As Word grew up, it began growing in other ways too. Some thought it was muscling up, but really it began taking on excess weight in the form of unnecessary features, too many formatting options and frightening fonts like Comic Sans. The toolbars took over the window space, and people began to feel lost in their own text editing program! It was a dark time for word processors.
Then Sergey Brin at Google had a word processor baby named Google Docs. Docs was much smaller and more agile than Word, having lost some of the more cumbersome features of it’s predecessor and gained some new, flashy skills, like real-time editing and cloud storage. Still, it had it’s quirks.
Then, from a single seed of awesomeness, watered profusely with the tears of a thousand designer souls killed by Comic Sans, sprouted a little munchkin named Draft. When people saw it, some wondered if Notepad had been reincarnated as a beautiful maiden, but no – it was better than that. Draft took all of the goodness from Google Docs and left everything else to moulder in the grave. All that was left was perfection: golden brown, just the right temperature and with a little whipped cream on top. Finally, the world was right again.
This month I’ve been using Draft for much of my writing. It’s a neat little tool that I’ve come to appreciate for it’s simplicity. If you do any writing, you might try it out and see if it fits your workflow. If you don’t write, I hope I made the writing entertaining enough to appreciate it anyway. Thanks for reading!