Why I Use Steampeak (And Why You Should Too!)

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Hello Steemit!

Got an interesting post for you guys today and one that I normally wouldn't do, however I've been watching the improvements that @steempeak has been making over the last few weeks and I genuinely believe that it's quickly becoming the interface with which to connect to the Steem blockchain.

Overview

Steempeak is a user interface that re-imagines Steemit as a social platform. Like Steemit.com or Busy.org it allows basic user actions like posting, commenting, voting, flagging and re-steeming. However, what sets Steempeak apart are additional features that aren't available on the native Steemit interface which are highly valuable to content creators. These tools vastly expand the ways in which a user can tailor their experience on the blockchain, helping to create a more seamless and intuitive user experience.

Key Features

Vote-strength sliders (available to all users)
Curation trail bookmarking
User favoriting
Tag favoriting
Feed customization (portfolio or linear)
Extended profile options
In-line post previewing
Post scheduling
Post templates
Drafts
Beneficiaries
And more!

Need more prompting? Let me show you around!

A Visual Guide

The Homepage

When you first log-in to Steempeak, this is the page that you will be greeted with. You'll notice that it's not the bare-bones feed that you see when you load up Steemit.com, there are a few added elements. In the middle, of course, is your feed, which can be filtered to exclude re-steemed content and also toggled between portfolio and linear view using the buttons on the top right. Prominently featured on the left and the right are your favorites, whether it's topics (tags), curators or users.

The ability to manually follow a curation trail is new and is only being visibly offered on select accounts right now (@curie being the only one that I am aware of), however you can follow any user's curation trail by visiting http://steempeak.com/@<user>/trail.

Rather than delegating your votes through an auto-trail using a service like SteemAuto, this offering allows you to follow a trail and upvote content you specifically like, rather than just any content the trail upvotes. This kind of discretionary use is par for the course on Steempeak, with other options like vote-strength sliders that show the proportionate STU amount and post-scheduling helping to increase accessibility for all users.

There are other helpful features for post editing like in-line preview. Rather than being hidden at the bottom of the draft page like on Steemit native, a live preview of your post is visible to the right of your editing field. This is helpful for formatting with bold, italics, headers, images and dividers and understanding the general flow of your article or content.

Like normal, when you're finished writing you add your tags and determine the payout split. Before posting using Steempeak, however, you can also review a number of helpful features like Beneficiaries (which allow you to allocate a % of the post's rewards to another user or service), self-upvote, and scheduling. I scheduled this post for 2:00 PM PST today, for example, but finished it last night.

The final area of benefit for content creators is the ability to save drafts and create templates for posting. Where before I used Google Drive to store all of my writing, now I can save drafts directly to the Steempeak for later editing. Templates allow me to speed up the process of adding the extra fluff I do to the beginning and end of each of my posts.

I also use templates to create the end of day reports for @tagalong, significantly reducing the time it takes to produce them after each day of curating.

Summary

If you use Steemit a lot for long-form content, blogging, curating or browsing, Steempeak is the app for you. Its intuitive interface and leading-edge features make it the premier platform to browse the Steem blockchain. Emphasis on user discretion, accessibility and customization help make sure that the platform can be tailored to each individual user's preferences. Stop wasting time with an out-dated design and step into the modern Steemit experience.

That's all for now, thanks for reading! (Notice me @steempeak)

Until next time, Mako