This looks cool, but my immediate thought was that the documents most in need of version control (and Word offers version control, but its hardly as elegant as what this purports) are the most complex ones: annual reports, long-form works, things that require the complex document elements that make Word feel so bloated sometimes. (Not to mention that these are documents that need to be worked on offline.)
Branding this service as a webapp seems like it's going to make those use cases impossible.
Thanks! Well so the inspiration for this came from just trying to get my wife to proof read my blog posts. Even a 600 word post ends up becoming a pain. I'd end up sending her a google doc, or email or whatever. She would end up copying and pasting it into a word doc and then resending to me so I could review her changes and only manually try to merge in the things I wanted.
I've found that even a couple friends can get a whole lot of use from Draft to edit something simple. I hear you though, and am definitely paying attention to the use cases. We'll see how it shakes out.
I've been running into this problem while working through marketing docs/accelerator apps/etc. with a new startup. There's still a huge hole in collaborative document editing. Tools are either too simple to do this well (thinking of hackpad) or too complicated for quick uses (editing mode in word/comments in google docs).
An elegant solution for this kind of back-and-forth editing dialog on short-form copy would be huge. Surprised it doesn't exist already. And the concept of one-click "commits" is a powerful one for versioning -- makes it much easier to find things than google's atomic "save everything" version control.
(Not the OP) Because that takes too much effort. For big pieces of general criticism maybe, but for rearranging a sentence or fixing a typo adding comments in the margins has too much overhead.
as a potential user, I was wondering if you have anything planned for offline use. Many times writers / blog drafters will take themselves offline to jam out some drafts.
If there's a local store that can keep version control distributed it would be great.
I think this would benefit from following a git/github model. Draft could be the local tool that creates and manages the document, and there could be an associated web service that helps with the collaboration. At the very least, this could be represented as an offline web application (similar to Google Docs).
Exactly. I really want something like this, but that allows me to use whatever word processor or text editor I want (offline!) to do the actual writing.
Branding this service as a webapp seems like it's going to make those use cases impossible.