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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

• 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?”).

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.

The event is about coworking, new tools for working in the context of the interweb, jobs of employees becoming more and more project-like-work and standards that change for all of us. The program offers loads of interesting panels. There will be time for short presentations (Got a project? Present it there!). And last but not least, there’s an extra room for the core topic of the day: coworking.

Coworking, by the way, “is the social gathering of a group of people, who are still working independently, but who share values and who are interested in the synergy that can happen from working with talented people in the same space.”

And how will doingText be part of that? Alex and I will present doingText, but more generally it’ll become a meet & greet. New forms of work need new kinds of tools. We’ll spend the day talking about how organizing work changes and has to change in order to fit the habits of a more and more digitalized world.

So, we hope to see you there. Oh, almost forgot. Entry is free and there’ll be lots of WLAN in there.

More information and the detailled program is to find on the Hallenprojekt’s blog.

Search
Imagine a friend told you he published the discussion on doingText for that event. But damn! What’s the link? And where was that email again? Or could it be he twittered it the other day? Hum, nothing found. Maybe, he skyped it…?
To get you out of those time-stealing situations there is now a site-wide search for published discussions. It searches the discussion titles so all you have to do is entering a keyword of the title.

The nice thing about it: You don’t have to be logged in to use the search. The search form appears already on the starting page. This is also good for you registered users. You only want to look up something you don’t quite remember. You hurrily have to download that text for the next meeting. You just want to show a discussion passage to someone while talking about the project and don’t want to bother with logging in first. For all those situations the search will be your helping hand.

However, there is a little constraint here: The search only catches explicitly published texts. With that there still is the control of the “owner” of a discussion to distinguish between making a text available for certain cowriters and make it available for whomever is interested in the topic.

New design of the sharing settings

Along with publish- and the search-option, the sharing settings got a new design. The table gives you more than quick the information on who can read, write, comment and search for your text.

There are also some news for the discussions themselves.

UTF-8
Do you care to write, for example, cyrillic or chinese signs? No problem. DoingText now supports UTF-8 encoding.

Relation of comment balloon and line and opening the comments section
This one falls into the category “little change, great effect”. There is now a little arrow going from the comment balloon to the related line. It makes the comment function easier to relate to the recent version of a line which makes working in doingText easier for you.

Opening the comments section is now combined with the edit mode. That means, whenever you directly enter a line you get the comments section with all the changes automatically shown. Vice versa, opening the comments will open the edit mode.
Here we have a question. When you switch to other lines to see the changes/comments there, the edit mode of the previous chosen line stays open. Does that bother you in some way? Please leave your word down in the comments or in the Feedback Forum on uservoice.

Notes on bug fixes
The deletion of discussions was broken and the News Feed showed a wrong date. That is now solved.
The list of discussions in the header is now case insensitive.

Download of *.txt and *.xml

The download section now comes up in a fashionable pop-up-window. This gives us the freedom to add whatever format is wished by you without challenging the clarity of the design of doingText.

With the XML download we reacted on the request to also export comments. The XML-data opens in the browser and you can then use the XML for further treatment.
The same goes for *.txt-downloads. These now also open within the browser. This is a solution for the handling of special characters. The direct download into a txt-file didn’t allow to take over special characters like the German umlauts which was indeed rather irritating. The browser view now gives a correct display of the text.

• Which additional formats do you prefer? Leave your ideas in the comments or on the uservoice-topic.

The News Feed.
When you now enter doingtext.com, you will be surprised by the News Feed. When it comes to asynchronic cowriting, the probably first thing you wanna see, when you come back to your texts, is: What has happened in the meantime? On the profile you now see the recent activities from your cowriters at a glance.

RSS feed for changes
When you are rather interested in tracking the changes of a certain text, you might want to subscribe to the newly implemented rss feed for discussions. To get this, switch to the history of your discussion and copy & paste the link from the address bar to your feed reader. (If you’re using the Internet Explorer, it will be kind enough to automatically offer you to save the feed.)

History of edits
This brings us right into the history. Here you find a chronological list of all changes by all cowriters. You might prefer this option in order to get a deeper insight to all the edits of one text while having them on one page.

Undoing edits
When you flip through the versions of a line, you see them in the text frame. To re-insert a previous version (aka undo changes), choose the desired version, click on “edit” and then save that version of the line.

Edit profile
The menu offers the new option “edit profile”. At the moment, here you can subscribe to or unsubscribe from the newsletter.

Directly invite users to protected discussions.
Besides telling your future coworkers the discussion-URI and the password separately, you can also add them directly if they have an account on doingText. Within the sharing settings simply put in the username and already you have your cowriters invited.

Various usability stuff
Aside from a few bug fixes there are also some minor improvements on the usability of doingText.

• The list of discussions in the header list box is now alphabetically sorted by title.
• Editing a line brings new clearness since it grows with the length of the text. You now see the whole text of a line. Of course, the line will shrink when you delete passages of the text.
• Newly inserted lines create a comment telling who has inserted that line. This way you really know who has made what.

So long for now. We hope you have fun exploring all the newbies.