Google Docs’ greatest strength is also its biggest weakness: ​ Everything happens in one document. This sounds ideal until you realize having only one document means: – Once published, you can’t work in private (anyone can pop in at anytime). – You can’t ask for edits without worrying about losing work (if someone forgets to track edits, you need to dig through a terrible version history UI to find the original). – You can't take the draft in a different direction (if you realize you need to make significant changes, but don't want to lose the original work, you need to create a new document). ​ The premise is fundamentally broken. ​ Not to mention, some people (like lawyers) can't even use Docs because of these privacy issues. They're stuck in Word. ​ To solve all these issues, we have to fundamentally rethink what a document could be: – We shouldn’t think of it as a piece of text. – We should think of it as a process. A collaboration. A series of moving parts that come together to form a result. ​ This process involves multiple drafts, to experiment, to write in private, to work in parallel, that can easily be merged into the final version. ​ git’s workflow enabled this kind of collaboration for engineers, and changed the way programmers work forever. It’s time this workflow was made available for writers. ​ At Butterdocs, we're building a complete writing environment so you can: – Be more productive – Collaborate seamlessly – Enjoy privacy – Keep all your notes, ideas, research, and playbooks in one place – And so much more ​ Welcome to the future.

Writing = thinking, and this is not a good environment to think in.

7 reasons why Google Docs is making you a worse writer: • It's basically a digital typewriter. Putting words on the page is just one aspect of the writing process: Google Docs is ignoring all the other dimensions (ideating, researching, outlining, editing).

There’s one thing that no writer can stand: people watching them while they write. This is a fundamental flaw with Google Docs and other cloud-based writing software, where everything is always ON. It even prohibits some industries (lawyers, publishers) to use these tools at all, even though they would have some advantages otherwise. But we do know how to solve this, software engineers deal with this very elegantly: when programmers get to work on something, they create a “branch copy” of the source code, where they can work in private – the same as creating a copy of a Word doc. When they are ready, they publish their changes, but instead of sending a Word doc via email, they just click a button to create a pull request: this automatically highlights all changes they want to make, and their collaborators can comment, ask questions, and approve or reject certain adjustments. They don’t have to remember to track changes beforehand, everything stays tracked in the background. And once the changes are approved, they don’t have to copy/paste them into the main doc, but just click “Merge” and everything that was approved carries over. There’s nothing holding us back from having a similar workflow when we work on documents – well, Google Docs is holding us back. ButterDocs is built from the ground up to enable this: * Want to work in private, without an anonymous petting zoo watching? Branches are private by default, and you can publish to your collaborators for discussion once you’re happy with what you did. * Want to try something out that you’re not sure about? Try it in a branch, and see it side-by-side before you commit to it and merge. * Want to get feedback from a client, but don’t want them to mess up your document? Invite them to a branch copy, where they can go wild on your doc, and you have complete control over what makes it into the main copy. There’s really no downside to this workflow. It combines the best of two worlds: the privacy of Word and the connected-ness of Google Docs. Try it and see how it feels.

Google Docs was supposed to be the future of writing, but it led us to a dead end. Here is why it is fundamentally broken, and how we’re fixing it at @ButterDocsHQ

I’ve interviewed hundreds — probably more than a thousand — writers on their work flows. When demoing ButterDocs, there’s this one thing that everybody loves: the stash.