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.

• To the survey.

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.

doingtext.com intro on Vimeo.

We wish you a lot of fun with the improvements and please remember the spinner-feedback.

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

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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 .