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.
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!”
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.
After the incredible Berlin Web Week, the next somehow-webtwopointO-event is going to happen. On Dec, 12th hallenprojekt.de and Markus Albers (author of “Morgen komm ich später rein“) present “Schöner arbeiten” - THE coworking event of the year here in Berlin. It’s held at the newthinking store (google maps) from 9 a.m. till 8 p.m.
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.
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.
Publish your discussions
Yes, non-protected discussions were actually accessible already. And nothing has changed in this matter: Spreading the URL of a discussion lets other cowriters work on the text without having to log in.
The news here is that you can explicitly publish your texts and in this way make them accessible to the site-wide-search.
The published discussions appear on the users profile. So if you’re a cowriter and know the user’s name but can’t remember the title not to mention the URL, you can also go that way.
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.
This week is up for a wide range of usability improvements and new features. Now there is a News Feed on the profile, there is a history with all changes, you can subscribe to an rss feed for all changes, you can directly invite other users to your protected discussions, the special character problem with txt-downloads got a solution and the export now also offers XML. Plus, we’d like to hear from you, which additional download formats you want to see.
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.
This week is not so much about the tool itself, but rather about the people using doingtext. Alex and I sat together and thought about who you might be. What your work environments are. What you like and don’t like about doingtext. Whether there is a feature you’d love to have, but we haven’t thought about that yet. That kind of stuff. And since we know that you people hate click galleries and since we’re no online news paper, we made it simple: 1 page, 11 questions.
The second thing is we inform people via newsletter now. This morning the 1st edition went out. Yay! The next is to come in 2 weeks and then so on. There will always be a handy overview about all new features. And the rest of the email is to be filled with specialties as for example the survey in this fortnight’s email.
But there is also a change to doingtext. When you next go to your profile, you’ll find the discussions listed in a new arrangement. There is now 1 list with all discussions and those are sorted by recency, i.e. those with the most recent changes are on top of the list.
This week brings some nice improvements. First, a lot of you have asked for the option to protect discussions. And here it is.
sharing settings
Behind the link “sharing settings” you will now find the link of the discussion as well as the option to protect it. Protection takes place by a self-chosen password which you then give to your cowriters separately. Plus, protected discussions are automatically encrypted via https.
Then, the handling of the edit mode is improved. Until last week, when you clicked into a line you had to wait for the server for a reaction before being able to start editing. Most of the time and for users with a good bandwidth that’s not a problem. But, nonetheless, technics might not always be that exemplary. Therefore now the edit mode is reached at once, without waiting for the server.
Paired with that, saving is now faster as well. You will experience the difference by an immediately disappearing save button and the appearance of the well known spinner.
Here we would like to hear your opinion!
Are you happy with that way of saving the changes? Do you happen to have any problems? Tell us down in the comments or by sending an email to support@doingtext.com. Thanks.
Next, some of you have asked for shorter URLs. These are now available in 6-character-length so can you can easily give away the URL while being on the phone and it’s more than simple for cowriters to write it down somewhere.
Last but not least, our introduction video is finished and published. It appears on the starting page and gives a short 1:33-min-intro on the core features of doingtext.
