The surprise that made me like Medium from the start
Trying out Medium, I couldn’t help but smile when I saw the formatting toolbar popping up after I selected some text.
It’s elegant, subtle, and appeared only when I needed it.
I love that an idea we delivered over one year ago in a product that doesn’t exist anymore is now the chosen form of interaction for the slickest posting experience around.
Here’s a video that shows what we did in Yahoo! Meme back in the day:
Notice that we went a step further and suggested links based on what was selected by the user. That worked surprisingly well if you were a descriptive linker. Our idea was to reduce disruption in the writing flow caused by the change tab - search - copy url - change tab - paste url behavior.
I doubt the Medium folks ever heard of Meme, and I’m sure someone else built this before and we never heard of them either.
But it’s really interesting to see the results of people thinking about the same problems and having the same technology available to them. Inevitably two or more groups open the same door to the adjacent possible and end up inventing the same thing.
UPDATE 8/20/2013 — I just noticed Google Docs has the search suggestions based on the selection as well:
