The last two weeks have been quiet a ride. As we are dealing with the last items on our milestone for this time period, the last few things are often the most annoying and take the longest. Let’s start with the bang, this release that will be hard to miss.

Tours

We have implemented our first version of tours that will introduce to you the various things you can do on the page. We have focused on the most important pages and high-level overview.

You can find the tours on the dashboards after you login, workshop, story and in the story editor, translator editors and beta reader. Finally, there is one upon entry to encyclopedia.

This is just a first step, and in then next iteration, we’ll focus on improving the design of the tour and maybe going more in-depth.

Adding video tours will be a middle step in this effort.

If there is a difficult page or functionality, you would like us to cover. Let us know in the comments and we’ll prioritize them.

New design implementation

We’ve took the opportunity with the tours to fix any issues we found during the implementation and to uplift the targetted pages when it comes to design.

In the grand schema of things we have made the top navigation a tiny bit smaller to increase the real-estate in the main view. In the story editor we are sporting a new menu and look of icons. There are also a few new functionalities. More on them later. Finally the story details aside got a new look, but we still have some way to go there. Elements of this were then carried over into the reader, beta reader and translator editor. Still more to come as we will slowly continue to improve the looks of individual parts towards our desired design.

The most notable change is in the encyclopedia. You will notice that the once sectioned form when editing entries is now open and breaths. The original design came from using fieldset element to denote the different elements of the entry. It was an interesting experiment, but it obiously doesn’t belong in a modern design nor where we want to go with our design.

That said we still have a long way to go with our design changes. We will implement these when ever we get the opportunity as we work on different parts of the website. This will often have a cascading effect over to other parts of the website. For example we plan to uplift our input elements and buttons soon. This will be noticable everywhere on the web as these elements are re-used almost everywhere.

Timer

With the new menus you will also notice a new button on the right. This is timer and you can select from 3 modes.

Regular stopwatch, countdown and Pomodoro. In Pomodoro you will be able to set the working and break time per your tastes.

For those that need to keep track of time when writing or remember to take a break we hope that this will be of use to you.

Recommended chapter length

One of the small minor features that was added to the story editor was a new aside view that now showcases recommended chapter length for your genre and publication frequency and if you have reached it.

It is super basic and hard-coded right now, but we will be adjusting these based on the overall trends in the future so that you have a metric to measure against.

Writing & reading time tracking

Now, this one isn’t fully implemented yet. You will not see any visual change either. In broader sense we are improving our statistics gathering capabilities so that authors can have better information about themselves and their readers.

In the past we have upgraded our architecture on gathering hits and unique visits on the tracked elements, but this was mostly when it comes to storage. Our next steps is to add more useful detailed tracking.

We are looking to see how long and when are people reading and the same on writing habbits paired with tracking how much was written.

Knowing when are people reading a story will give author the necessary information on when is the best time to publish this story and can provide other useful statistics.

For now we are trying to gather some testing data and establish the best architecture to gather this data and store them. We will also be looking into if we want to keep this feature for our subscribers or allow it for everyone.

For security reasons and following our principles we will be keeping all this data ourselves and also writing most (if not all) the infrastructure ourselves. We’ll let you know about any updates as we have them. We hope that we will have some interesting graphs for you soon.

Miscelaneus

• Bug fixes through the app

• Homepage got new top picture with mascots