Why we made Draftastic
We – Nick and Charlie – have been working on stuff together a long time, and by far the most productive thing we do is argue.
Up until around 2004, the way we collaborated on written work was to laboriously pass files back and forth by e-mail. That really sucked. Then we discovered SubEthaEdit, an excellent text editor for programmers, and one of the first to support live document sharing.
However, from the start, we noticed we kept writing over each other. We’d disagree about how to phrase something, or just get inspired by what the other had written, and end up typing in the same spot, producing a lot of colorful gibberish. After a few such attempts, we evolved the convention that whenever we had competing ideas, we’d copy and paste a paragraph or two and each of us would work on his own version for a bit, then compare.
So we got to wondering: if we naturally have to share by paragraphs anyway, why not just build the editor around that? This shouldn’t be a problem. It’s how people work anyway. And, heck, wouldn’t it make the software simpler? Synching algorithms are complex and easily confused by imperfect network conditions (like, say, coffeeshop wireless). Why go to all the trouble just so two opinionated authors can step on each other’s toes?
It’s both a blessing and a curse of the modern software world that whenever you have a neat idea, chances are good that someone else is already hard at work on it. So we waited, assuming the web would provide our editor any day.
It didn’t. Many collaborative editors came along – most famously, Google Docs – but they all focused on increasingly clever and complicated solutions to the complex problem: how do you build a constraint-free editor that many people can use at the same time? They overlooked the much simpler problem: what one constraint can you use to build an editor that will be simpler for both the machines and the people?
Our answer is Draftastic. It fills a very specific niche. It’s the text editor for people who want to write things together by hashing out ideas rather than waiting their turn.
It’s a terrible word processor, and an even worse IDE, and at no time did we commission any cool new persistent HTTP servers to make it happen. But if you have some folks you like to write with, and you sometimes think you know better than them, it just might be for you.