We are celebrating our launch not only by having a barbecue. We are also giving away free doingText accounts! 3 Large Plans, 5 Medium Plans and 10 Small Plans will be raffled.

To participate in the contest simply mention doingText somewhere: say something on twitter, facebook or your blog, put up a video on YouTube or do whatever you can think of. Then add the link or a screenshot into our Celebrate-the-launch-discussion.

The contest is open until Apr, 22nd. Next Thursday our fairy will draw the winning names. We will be giving away 3 Large Plans, 5 Medium Plans and 10 Small Plans - free for a lifetime.

This contest is open for everyone, not just doingText users. So tell your friends

Pure excitement here at doingText. We’re now out of beta and along with the launch, we gave our doingText a fresh design.

Yesterday has been a very busy day. In the morning the last tests for the credit card payments went well and that was the starting signal. doingText left the beta and went online with its fresh design. Right afterwards, a few problems occurred. As a colleague said: It’s not a real launch if you have no bugs in it. In detail, OpenID didn´t work and the Internet Explorer still was a bit beastly. But that is solved already. If you still happen to find any bugs, please tell us so. You can email us on support@doingtext.com or leave a message in our Feedback Forum.
So everything was ready for the barbecue in the evening, chilling and celebrating doingText’s launch.

The subcsriptions are now open, too. As announced, we offer several plans starting with the Free Account and the Micro Plan and going up to the Really Large plan. You can up- or downgrade or cancel your subscription at any time. Payment can be made with credit cards (VISA and Mastercard).

Yeah, a lot happened in the past days. Not only are there new features for managing the account, but also improvements regarding the system behind those things you see and the usability of doingText.

Generally, doingText has become more efficient. Alex implemented more JavaScript and having advanced the caching, especially the discussions are loaded faster up until factor 5. For you this means working with doingText gets smoother which, in return, enables you to concentrate on the text even more. And eventually, that’s our great goal: doingText eases your workload as much as possible regarding the organisational stuff (sharing, editing, talking and getting everything together) and you concentrate on writing perfectly fitting texts for your purposes.

Automatic saving - “cancel” button abolished
Did you also have the experience of editing a text, having like 10 lines parallely in edit mode and when you’re finished you start searching for any open lines to get them saved? This was not really the most efficient way of work. That’s why the so far known buttons for “saving” and “canceling” recent edits are history.
Saving now goes automatically as soon as you switch to another line or discussion or whatever your next click is. You write and as soon as click somewhere else (the next line, a place outside the discussion, the message link, …) everything gets saved what is written in the line at that exact moment. Fewer clicks promise more fun!

Discussions list in the header
The list of your discussion up in the header of the site got a faceliftung, too. No way to get lost within a high amount of titles anymore.
The list is now a combined drop-down-list with an auto-completer. When you click into the search field, a drop-down-list with all your discussions appears, sorted by title. When you know the name of the discussion you want to work on, type it in and the list then gets shorter and shorter through the auto-completion. Just like you know it from Wikipedia, youtube and alike.

Consistent interfaces for mobile and browser environments

The iPhone interface has been adapted to the browser interface. At the bottom of the site you find the link to switch between the mobile and the standard version. This way iPhone and iPod touch users can now decide if the wish to simply look at their discussions or use doingText with all the features.

Public discussions on the start page: See what the others are doing.
As already mentioned, the start page is getting revised as well. One part of this revision is the presentation of the latest public discussions there.
The start page shall give a short and yet precise overview of what doingText actually is. The public discussions provide some handy material, something to look at and give practical examples of what doingText can be used for. For first, rather experimental steps there will be a sandbox, too.
But the list of the latest public discussions is not only meant for new people. It is for everyone being interested in what other doingText users are working on and wanting to share their knowledge and thoughts.

By the way, the most recent public discussion “Uses for doingText” comes from @pontus.

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?”).

We have now opened the site for a first bunch of people. To access the site you will need a beta invite key. If you want one just leave a comment under this post or use the invite form at doingtext.

Doingtext is a text collaboration tool. After entering your invite key you will be able to start a new discussion about a text that is already there or to be written. You can send the URL of this discussion to anyone you want (they don’t need an account or invite) and they can comment on every line of your text and suggest changes. We will post a video of how it all works shortly.

In the coming weeks we will be adding a couple of features already planned, but we also want to fit doingtext to your needs. So if you have a problem, and idea for a feature or an improvement please use the feedback button on the right hand side of every page and send us feedback. We will read it all and incorporate it into doingtext.

Thanks for trying out doingtext.

This is the first post about a product I have been working on in the past few weeks. As the name - DoingText - suggests its purpose has to do with texts - and talking about them. The idea for it came to me on a random sunday afternoon while I was chatting with two friends over skype and we complained not about having the right tool for working on another project. Seconds later it struck me that we would not be the only people having this problem, hence there must be a market for it only waiting for me. So I started working.

My process has been heavily influenced by the folks over at 37signals and their getting real philosophy. Most of the time spent so far has been on weekends and evenings, I still have my “day job” as one of the owners of upstream. One thing that has helped me steal some more time for DoingText is that we introduced our version of the 4 day week a couple of month ago: Friday is research day. And my research is now DoingText. Though having brought probably more than 10 Ruby on Rails projects online I can still consider it research. This is the first project without a set deadline, without a fixed amount of money, without a client wanting to see progress a.s.a.p. - it’s my project and I can pay as much attention to any details as I want (and that’s a lot more than in previous projects). Being able to work this way makes it a whole lot of fun to work on, and I hope you will see that too once you get your hands on the product.

I will be starting a closed beta within the next weeks. If you want to be among the first people to try it out please subscribe to the RSS feed or follow doingtext on twitter. You can contact me at alex[at]doingtext.com or via the comments below this post.