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.

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.