Archives for category: thetyper

The Typer reviewed

April 9, 07 //
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I got a nice easter present yesterday: The Typer  got reviewed on the Rails App Week by Darren at The Web2.0 Show

They nailed it right:  it’s simple by purpose, and i’d dare to say that it has been a big experiment for me in building a clean and simple interface that makes sense for the application.

Posts about thetyper have been very few in the last months, but this is not because the application itself was abandoned, but rather because the typer achieved its goals, and was good enough for my own use.

Some of the techniques i learned while developing it have been useful for me and will spark in various projects that I’m doing as a freelance. Moreover I’m planning some improvements to the interface which will go towards further reducing modality of the interface and improving keyboard commands.

I hope that more people will use it and find it useful, and I’ll be listening to their suggestions to improve it (if you wish you can contact me at luca (at) thetyper.com ).

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Removing modality

October 25, 06 //
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I read today the humanized blog and I find it’s (very) true what Aza Raskin wrote in Monolog Boxes and Transparent Messages: the best interace should aim to minimize the interruptions in what the user is doing.

When you are “in the zone”, especially when writing or designinig or programming, any interruption in your flow of tought is dangerous and makes you to lose that special status of sharp, focused attention that fosters creativity. Modality in an application interface causes these breaks the main activity and should be reduced when/where possible.

I know that there are many points that can be made better in TheTyper to make the writing esperience even more seamless, and I’ll look into ways to reduce the modal interactions that can interrupt the writer. The first task is to embed the spell check into the main editor, enabling some kind of check-as-you-type mode of operation.

I don’t see many more sources of modal interactions that can be removed from the interface, since all the rest of the popups are for operations which aren’t usually done while writing (e.g. changing the fonts or exporting the document) but nevertheless I’ll need to think a bit more on these issues.

It’s open!

October 12, 06 //
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TheTyper has been open since the first of october, but it still lacked a real announcement on the blog. So here it is.

You can go to TheTyper and register for your free account. You’ll then be able to start wiriting your notes online within an environment built to help you concentrate on the act of writing.

The whole page is filled by the writable area, just as you’d have on a typewriter (the menu folds in and out on your request). Your documents will be autosaved each minute and you’ll be able to spell check them.

May you want to show your work to someone else, TheTyper lets you give a document an unique address through which it can be accesses in a read only way (e.g. here is my talk proposal for the europe rails conf), or you can publish it to a blog with the export function.

The editing page can be customized to fit your needs choosing the text and background color and the font size and family (and this preferences are remembered by the document).

I hope you’ll appreciate it, and please let me know your opinions!

The Typer is launching this week

September 27, 06 //
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The code for thetyper is essentially done, but i have decided to wait a couple of days before turning the switch and deploying the code just to make it rest (and to do a final bug hunt and docs polishing).

It will have a bunch of new features, which i felt were needed to make it really useful (the most important will be the ability to push a document to a blog via the metaweblog apis), a bit of polishing of the interface (e.g. there is now a font chooser with font preview), and a lot to support the administrative part of having paying customers.

The main interface has remained the same so I think that it’s still true its purposes of being a distraction free writing environment.

The Typer

August 21, 06 //
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I like to use “simple” text editors rather then word processors to write, I use TextMate on OSX and TextPad on Windows, adopting the OPML editor when i need to support and track structure. But when I saw Writeroom about a month ago I was struck with its beautiful design and essential feature set, I thought that it would have been great if such a kind of editor existed on the web (I was constantly using gmail drafts to jot down notes while not in my office). I have seen that many other around me are doing pretty much the same so having some time this month I did go on and build it myself.

I was planning to start development after I completed Tiber (a web feed reader I’m working on) but then the spreading of the “no frills editor” meme around the blogsphere (see here, here and here) made me change my plans and I suspended Tiber, while working on this writer tool.

Two weeks after The Typer was ready (have a look at the screencast!).

I have put it online with the hope to to show the work and to receive some feedback. If anyone wants to test it, just register your email on the site and i’ll send you an invitation (I’m doing this just to be able to handle the load gradually on the server, I’ll open up the service in september).