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:

See you tomorrow at the barcamp.

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 .