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.
As already written, the presentations at the BarCamp Berlin 3 and the Webmontag were awesome. I think, I don´t blow out of all proportions if I say that the respective audience had loads of fun.
In the aftermath, quite a number of folks gave doingtext a shot and some of them even found the time to blog about it.
Markus Spath from netzwertig.com wrote about “An Texten zusammenarbeiten und diese kommentieren” (To work on texts together and comment them). He surrounds his review with a short intro on how text collaboration used to be in the old days and gives an excellent note on what doingtext is about: the pure text and the communication about it.
Miriam Winkels claimed in her Pisastudio “You are not alone“. As an upcoming teacher she is interested in using web2.0 technologies in the school environment and thinks about how doingtext can ease working processes or even make them possible in the given time frames every teacher has.
Regine Heidorn kind of followed her first impressions in the usage and gave a good and deep overview of how doingtext works, which features it has and - most important - how you feel about it as a user: “Doingtext - Textarbeiten” (Doingtext - Doingtext).
Dirk Nolte let himself inspire by Regine and instantly tried doingtext for coworking on one of his blog posts: “DoingText. Texte online bearbeiten.” (Edit texts online).
But last week was indeed not all about presenting the tool and speaking to future users. Alex found the time to implement a feature which comes along like a a tiny, little thingy, but with great effect. Changes to the text will be presented to you at a glance when you come back to your discussion.
The colors of the comment balloons will show you what happened or if actually anything has happened. No more reading the whole text, trying to remember what the last version might have been. No more clicking the comments balloon only to see that you were indeed the last person to change this line. Effortless text collaboration is our claim. Effortless text collaboration is what you shall get. So, how does it work and what do the colors tell you?
Doingtext gives you a quick look on what has happened in your time of absence by coloring the comment balloon. The dark orange indicates changes (comments and/or edits) recently added by your coworkers. The dark green refers to lines which you are the last editor of. And the pale ones say that there have been no changes made in the meantime. Simple as that it shall be.
And as always: Tell me if you happen to have a problem, an idea or whatever. Either by commenting here or by sending an email.
This weekend brought the Guides (formerly known as FAQ). Here you can find information on all the possiblities doingtext offers you.
Also, there are now 10 invites for every signed up user to give away.
All you need is the email address(es) of your coworker(s). We have prepared a short text that goes along with the invitation which you can of course change to your needs.
So… We had our first public presentation of doingtext here at the BarCamp Berlin. Now, that deserves a short yay! It went very well. We received very positive feedback by most of the people attending the session. Me, I tend to believe, it was the cat content that made it… But no, that’s not really true. There were lots of folks being interested in the tool. Responses like “Oh shit, that doingtext thing would’ve been perfect for my last project!” brings little smiles into my face. Plus, the questions brought in the discussion brought a clearer view on what kind of collaboration and text types doingtext can help the most.
We embedded the presentation into a broader review of text collaboration tools, beginning with the analog way of working face-to-face and with a pencil and paper. From there on we drew the line to the digital universe and took a deeper look at how the analog way of text collaboration is handled by the digital world and how things can be made even easier with the technique. In the following days I will probably bring some more content on this. Maybe even some cats…
For now the first day of the BarCamp is over. But before the evening begins, I would like to bring a big THANK YOU to Jan for spreading the word - and doing that very successful!
And for those of you being in berlin the next days: Our second presentation while the Berlin Web Week will be at the Webmontag. Hope, we’ll see you there.
Tomorrow is our first public presentation of doingtext. We got really excited while preparing our talk so we called our designer and told him to create some T-Shirts for us - in addition to the 300 flyers with invite codes we are going to hand out tomorrow. 3 hours later he came to the office with T-Shirts and flyers. Here is a photo:
In the next days, Berlin will be the center of the German and even of the international internet community: Berlin Web Week is ahead. And with it, some exciting days will come.
This weekend will see Alex and me at the BarCamp Berlin 3. We plan to hold a session about text collaboration and its tools. What is required by the tools? Which tools are out there and how do they all meet the needs of the collaborators? (Yes, we will have a closer look at our competitors.) What is the difference between talking about and working together on a text while meeting in real life to the situation of working on it over the internet? These are the gross frames within which we want to talk about text collaboration.
To speak frankly, this will of course help us with the development of doingtext. But furthermore text collaboration tools give a good hint on how working situations change with the possibilities of the internet and their world wide connections.
If you’d like to attend our session and have further ideas or questions, please feel free to put them into the comments.
The second chance to meet us will be on Monday. We will present doingtext at the Webmontag. This takes place at the newthinking store (Tucholskystr. 48 in Berlin-Mitte) and will begin at 8 p.m. We are the first on the schedule, so have your dinner ready by then and enjoy our presentation.
On both events we will also spread invitation codes so you can start using doingtext at once.
Before we come to this week’s new features, let me mention a few bug fixes.
Working with newly inserted lines was problematic in 2 ways. First, it was necessary to reload the discussion to reorder new lines. This is not necessary any more. Second, if you created new lines at the bottom of your discussion, those lines were only seen after having reloaded the discussion. This is also fixed.
Changing the colors of lines was not possible with Firefox. This now works properly. … Wait. Changing colors? What the heck is she talking about? Yes, I failed to mention this feature in our last week’s “new feature”-post. Sorry for that. So how does it work? When you hove over a line and the comment/edit bubble appears, you will see a little pink box next to the edit-link. Clicking on this box will change the background color of that line to pink. Click again and you will have a yellow line and so on. There are 3 colors to choose from: pink, yellow and a somewhat pastel turquoise.
A subtle but important change for all you coders out there. For making doingtext easier to use for code reviews, from now on the indentation of all lines is shown correctly.
Now this week is offering some important new features for doingtext. You can now format your texts with textile and you can view your discussion as a presentation.
Presentation
The presentation feature offers you the possibility to show the latest version of your discussion. You find the link right next to the “Download PDF”-link. How can you handle the presentation tool? Here is a list of its skills:
At first, there will only be 1 slide containing the whole of your text. To create new slides, simply insert 2 blank lines.
If you have more than 1 slide you can switch between them by either clicking the pagination or the next/previous-link in top right corner or hit the space/backspace keys on your keyboard.
You may use the presentation link as your personal preview as well. As it opens in a new tab, you can parallely work on your text and then switch to the presentation, reload the page and - voilà - here are your changes.
Text formatting
The second new feature is probably that one you were waiting for mostly: formatting the text. Doingtext is using the textile markup language for this. If you’re used to working in a wiki, you almost have everything you need to know.
Almost, because to make textile work in your discussion, first thing, you have to rename your discussion. Simply add .textile to the title of the discussion, e.g. “new discussion.textile” (without the quotation marks, of course). Second, reload the page. Third, start formatting your text.
For those of you not used to wikis, textile is providing simple tags for the basic needs of formatting. For example, if you want to have a bold phrase, you have to type it this way: *a bold phrase*. If you want to format a phrase as a headline, add h1. to h6. (with a space character) before the phrase, e.g. “h4. Creating tables with textile” will become
Creating tables with textile
.
Within the next days there will be an FAQ containing all of the markup tags. Until then you may have a look at the textile site or at the wikipedia article .
The weekend brought a range of new features which give a nice hint of what working with doingtext shall be in the future. You can now
Change the title of a discussion. This is the name of the document which will also be shown on the starting page and in the drop down list of “Your Discussions”.
Reorder lines per drag ‘n’ drop.
Split lines/paragraphs by inserting a line break.
Download your discussions as a pdf.
Besides this a few bugs were eliminiated and adjustments of the usability were made.
Also, we have now made available the Terms of Service as well as our Privacy Policy. If you have any questions on this, please don’t hesitate to contact us. Additionally to the feedback function you can reach us by e-mail: support [at] doingtext.com.
First, I may shortly introduce myself: Katrin’s my name. I just started working with Alex on the doingtext-universe. Doingtext is made for collaboration and, based on that idea, we want to collaborate with the users as well. A list of channels how to reach us can be found in the previous post On user feedback by Alex. In this area of the universe I will back him up.
On the level of closed beta, doingtext is definitely still susceptible for bugs (or, as I like to call it, open for new experiences with every kind of browser) and even more definitely open for ideas on new features. Besides getting active feedback via twitter or this blog, one essential tool for your ideas is the uservoice Feedback Forum.
If you happen to stumble upon a bug, feel free to describe it here. Also, you can suggest features you would like to see on doingtext as well as changes of existing ones. Alex will use the Forum to decide on which feature next to be programmed. With the votes you can generally mark your enthusiasm for a certain feature and there is the option to discuss a suggested feature in the comments. Additionally, there will be extra polls in the future.
So keep up your voice and let us know which feature you wish to see.
