At first, we want to say sorry for the mishap in the HTML-version of our last newsletter. We hope reading it hasn´t been too uncomfortable for you. Besides this, there are some fine news on new features.

The “home”-page is the central place for you to keep track of your discussions and manage your account settings. Consequently, the “edit profile”-link has moved to the “home”-page. Here, you can change your password and subscribe to or unsubscribe from the newsletter.
Also on the “home”-page there is now the possibility to specify your “News Feed” settings. The most important innovation is the option to get informed by email on certain events. Most likely you won’t have a daily look into your doingText account if there is no recent discussion you’re working on (though it’d be lovely to hear so from you). But you surely check your emails at least once a day. So there is now the option to get informed by email when someone…

As you can see, you actually have the choice how you wish to get informed: only within the “News Feed”, only by email or both.

As you might have already noticed, the start site is under ongoing reconstruction. While talking to users, the start page got into our focus. It became obvious that it doesn’t perfectly convey what doingText is actually all about. For this reason we are currently revising the start page. Some first changes are already applied and there is more to come.

For the concept of the start page we try to take the perspective of someone completely unfamiliar with doingText. When you (and this counts for all of us, I guess) read of a new online service or some new product in general, one of the questions that come to mind is: “Are there already people out there who can tell me something about the tool? What’s it good for? How do other folks use it?”
To meet this question, we want to bring in the voice of all those of you already using doingText. Sharing your experiences is the motto.

• What is your top reason for using doingText?
• Which part of it is the most striking motivation for you to leave Word, GoogleDocs and all the others behind or how can it complement other tools?
• In which context does doingText fit into your working habits?

We have created a discussion where all the reasons are collected. Some aspects are already mentioned and we hope you can bring in much more.

We have some exciting news this week: Kristina Schneider joined the doingText-team. She’ll take care of design and usability and already has some fine ideas. We’re thrilled and you can be, too. Expect some great changes!
Now for the new features of this week.

Add lines a new way

At the bottom of the discussion field there is now an “Add Line”-button. It adds a new line at the end of the text. We have added this button for usability reasons. People starting their first discussion ever, happened to be startled by the display of text within the lines and thereby not knowing that clicking the line and hitting enter creates a new line.

Growing text area for comments
Just like the line fields of your text grow with the content, now the the text field of the comments grow, too. This way the commenting person always has the whole comment in sight.

Confirming notifications
Inspired by the Growl app für Mac OS X, all confirming notifications now come along in that style. There’s a little rectangle showing up in the upper right corner of the site for a few seconds. It tells you what has been successfully done. It appears after events like changing that status of a discussion, adding collaborators to your discussion, sending an doingText-invite to someone or logging out of your account.

Negative CAPTCHAs
The dark side of being on top of the google search when it comes to “text collaboration” is that we’re becoming interesting for spammers. We have now implemented a negative CAPTCHA to cope with spambots at least for the near future. It’s called negative, because the CAPTCHA works exactly the other way round and you as a user won’t see anything of it. There is no extra field the user has to fill in, but an invisible field for the bots called Honeypot. If something is filled in that hidden field it must be a spambot. Those requests will then be ignored.
More information on negative CAPTCHAs can be found on Ned Batchelder’s site.

No long opening speech today. Let’s get right into this week’s news.

Login notifications

Entering a site and not getting nowhere, ’cause the failwhale’s little brother won’t let you? Now what is wrong? From now on, you’ll get a specific answer to that question. Logging in to doingText, 3 possible mistakes can occurr. Either the account is not yet activated, the login (user name)/ email address is unknown or the password is wrong. So you exactly know what’s going on and what to do in the next step.

RSS feed
Subscribing to the RSS feed is now as easy as easy can be. In the header of a discussion you find the RSS symbol. Put the link to your feed reader and get informed on all the comments and edits to a discussion.

Auto-resize of images
So far, inserting large images led to the phenomenon that the images exceeded the discussion frames. And yes, that looked kinda awkward. Now images are automatically adjusted to fit the size of the discussion.

Textile
At this point on or another might need a little recollection of what Textile is about. The basics are to find in our guides. If you’re already used to wikis, Textile will be very familiar to you. If not, the don’t worry. Textile is really simple.
A few words ahead: Textile is a markup language used here in doingText to structure text passages on a minor level - just insofar as it is needed to talk about a text comfortably. We have already introduced it in our blog some weeks ago and here’s the link to our Guides.
There’s 2 steps: First, add .textile to the discussion title up in the header. For example “Films of the Week.textile”.
Second, use the Textile tags. Here are a few examples:
For bold phrases write *bold phrase*.

For bulleted lists write
• * Point a
• * Point whatever

Images, to come back to this, can be inserted by adding exclamation marks around the URL of the images: !imageurl!.

If you happen to find any tags not working, please don’t give up. Just write me an email to katrin [at] doingtext.com or use the Feedback button on the right to let us know.

Deleting comments


There have been requests for being able to delete single comments. This is now possible for comments you created yourself. Furtheron, the discussion owner can delete all comments. That way you can keep your comments balloon as cleaerly arranged informative as you wish to.

iPhone screenshot
We just love it! So yeah, here’s a picture of the read-only iPhone and iPod touch interface. And, by the way, there’s no extra URL or so needed. The interface loads automatically when entering doingtext.com via iPhone or iPod touch.

(thanks to iPhoney)

Since iPhone and iPod touch users now have the possibility to read and show their discussions, the question arises:

• Is there generally any interest in a mobile interface?

Spontaneously, I could think of a few situations where to use it. You’re talking to your team members about that one project while sitting for lunch and don’t have your notebook with you. Or you meet someone for a beer in the evening, the conversation comes to the subject of your recent article and you want to have a direct feedback on it. Or or or…

How often do these situations happen?
Or, putting the question differently, do you often feel like “D’oh, if I only could look up this detail right now!”

You can leave your ideas in the comments. There is also a vote for it in the uservoice Feedback Forum (direct link: “Q: Mobile interfaces for doingText?”).

The first snow of this winter is past already. Berlin’s a little bitch when it comes to winterwonderlands. And while I grieve for that a few more moments, the new features are coming around.

First, the fixed bugs. Editing protected discussions was not possible in some cases. This is solved. The textile code for interlaced lists didn´t show up correctly. That is straightened as well. But now for the new features of this week.

User-to-user-messages

Working together with other doingText-users? Send them messages with all that’s on your mind. To send a message (aka to start a dialog), go to the profile of the other user. Right beside the user’s name you will find the “Send Message”-link. On the messages site you find all your dialogs. Here you can also directly answer to messages from your cowriters.

Undo function
You changed a passage several times, tried various alternative phrases and finally came to the conclusion that the first version was already the best? “Revert to version x” is your way to go. When you browse through the versions of a line that link will automatically appear.

Icons for the discussion status
Left to the discussion’s title icons show up if and when a discussion is published and/or protected so you can easily spot wether your valuable data is secure or not.

Read-only iPhone interface
Actually, this was not at all a planned feature. Alex wanted to take his shopping list with him without having to rewrite it on a piece of paper. And so the read-only-iPhone-interface was born. It can be used with the iPhone and the iPod touch. After logging in on doingtext.com, you see the list of your discussions and can read them.