hello everyone and welcome back to the keep productive youtube channel today's video we
are checking out craft this is something i've actually been needing to check out for a while
because a lot of people are actually pointing this application to me and saying
this is a great application for creating documents it's also something that they
wish some of the features were available in notion now craft is an application that
apparently creates amazing documents and i've had to play around with it i wanted to give you
some of my thoughts and opinions on it also all the information that you need to know
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so as i said craft is getting a lot of attention even andy matusak i hope i got his name wrong
tweeted about it the other week it's really a blend between a document tool and a wiki tool
to some extent and has some really cool ways of being very flexible to the end user let's get
started with some of the detail it's available on mac and ios and the mac version works very well
it's priced fairly reasonably they have a free plan which much like notion that the start has a
thousand block limits it has some pdf exports but it also has sync available in it which is perfect
if you're using both the iphone and the mac versions you've also got inline markdown
and every file you upload can be up to five megabytes with a total of one gigabytes total
storage there is a five dollars per month fee which does give you access to the magical card
abilities which we'll talk about later and some more storage and advanced features so i'm going
to be doing this demo on mac i actually played around with it a little and i'm going to show you
i guess two cool ways you could use it one is a way to be creative in sharing documents externally
and two some of the writing abilities inside the app so this is craft available on mac and as you
can see it looks really nice as you enter you've got all documents shared or starred
sorry so you can create documents here that are favorited and you can also create a folder system
so for example if you wanted to go and start to create a new document you go to new document here
and what i really like about this is it seems fairly robust it works online and offline and
it looks really attractive when you're using it so let's make this a little bit bigger
so as you can see the page is very clean on this right hand side you can actually toggle
the sidebar but there's actually this option to see a sort of mini version of that let's
start up at the top with the plus bar you can insert text you can even drag text in
and even code snippets very much like what notion launched with originally in 1.0 and you can even
add lines in as well and any photos you can drag them directly from your computer you could also
change the styles as well so for example let's add a bit of detail so as you can see here if i
selected the text i can do all of the regular text formatting but over here i can change the styling
in a quite advanced fashion so i can make the subtitles i can make headings i can change the
detail inside of the font and i can change it into a page itself or a card but we'll come to grouping
i think that's one of the magic features i could even turn it into a task or make it focused or
block it if i wanted to that's a little bit of decoration you can add around the edges
you can change the color and even the serif or mono fonts below you can also change the general
page details as well so if you wanted the whole page to appear as a serif font then you can you
can even add things like cover images and you can get them from unsplash you can show author which
is perfect for blogging and you can even change it from block spacing from dynamic to classic and
even page width from regular to wide and down here for the writers you can see the full documents
whether the word count or the character count you might need over here you've got some advanced
shortcuts so you can use the keyboard shortcuts to specifically open up commands which might be
helpful for those folk so up here you can see that you can actually add a new document really nicely
but you can actually open up tabs and they're very subtle almost like a little web browser up here
so one of the documents i created was this best resources list and i found i'll show
you how easy this is so for example if i wanted to pull together a few resources that are in the
community at the moment let's make one for craft so all i'd have to do is go to the text or styling
and go ahead and create a card you can see here the card pops up and you've got a few options
just to note this card thing is actually only available in the pro account which i worked out
and you can see here you can change it to a range of different options in this case i'm going to go
with this square option you can change the font style to be fun classy modern and you can even
change the background as well so let's choose an option there so it's almost like a graphic design
um sort of layout as well and once i'm happy i can apply the style as you can see here i've made a
really nice page really easily and i can even move up next to this which is perfect especially when
i'm trying to conglomerate information especially if i'm going to share this publicly so here's one
i created earlier as you can see notion resources has a list of people that are good to follow and
also an image here as well and they're almost like mini pages so for example if somebody was
able to access this externally so let's go ahead to the share and publish option copy the link and
as you can see this is what it looks publicly like as you can see you can change it from dark
mode to light mode there's a little bit of water mark down at the bottom but you can open them up
and it's quite an interactive little site found is super similar to the coder publishing ability
so for example as you can see here they use this sort of like a little bit of sort of page or
card creation that you can do inside of coders databases but as you can imagine i would say it
looks a lot more attractive than say coders way of doing it especially because they've got this sort
of crafting a card or style ability so i would say in my opinion that is the killer feature it
goes a little bit further than that so for example i wanted to quite create a page or a basic version
of that if i go here and group that as a page you can see that that comes up as an option like this
and there's a perfect demonstration of it in some of the content that they create as you can see
here you can create these really nice pages that are nested within there without much effort at all
so in terms of the collaboration in terms of the creating notes it's super nice to do and it
really doesn't take that long either so you could create yourself a really nice attractive looking
one pager or attractive looking getting started guide for a party that may be watching so they
actually did this for their press kit page and as you can see this is all built inside of craft and
you can naturally see that it looks pretty good um obviously you could go a bit further by creating
these more advanced sort of sections and things like that for the basics it does the job well
so when one of the emails that i got the other day from them they actually demonstrated some
ways to use it for productivity so for example you could do use it for meeting notes weekly plans um
for example portfolios cvs case studies seems quite extensive and what's cool i guess
is if you wanted not to just use it for documents you could probably use it as a sort of wiki system
here's their weekly goals version as you can see here they've set themselves weekly goals
of things that they want to do and people per team so it's quite cool the way that you can actually
set these things up i set up a really basic one called today and as you can see here i've added
some tasks here that are all check offable check off the ball i couldn't for example add detail but
much like applications like dropbox paper i could use a slash command and type in a date and as
you can see here the date appears on the right hand side if i wanted to create a wiki i could
use these cool card things to create that and any page you want to you can go ahead and add content
to and it will draft it as a brand new page and as you can see like a wiki it would create
those breadcrumbs that allows you to create the pages once they've actually been added detail to
so this application's really cool in terms of its structure it allows you
to do a range of different things and i think the killer feature is that grouping ability
but do i think it's going to take over notion um i'll maybe give it a bit more time a few
more features down the road so for example it does have some uh backlink abilities so for
example in this case when i mentioned rome in another article i went and pressed at mention
and you can see here that it allows you to connect it up with existing documents or pages inside of
other craft documents so for example if i clicked into this rom link you can see here
that it's got backlinks automatically created so it does have some potential abilities to
expand into a productivity application but at the moment it's a documents application and a
really attractive one at that and i think at the moment it is early days to say whether this could
be a productivity app but i'm seeing a lot of people use it for that but at the moment it's
a really great looking documents app and i would say it does go ahead and create amazing documents
that really stand out if you're looking to share them or even collaborate with other people because
you can do real-time collaboration here as well anyway folks i hope you enjoyed today's video on
craft thank you very much for watching along today and hopefully i shared all the right information
i'd love to hear some of your thoughts on this are you using it at home i would really like to hear
in the comments below so folks please do subscribe and i'll talk to you all very soon cheerio
you