New Writely Features

Wednesday, February 1, 2006

• An improved active documents tab.
  It's now much shorter and only includes documents from the last month. No more truncated titles, tags or document names -- and, the columns are now sortable. Active documents now appear bold in the lists.
   
  
• The ability to empty the Trash.
  Finally! Get rid of unwanted documents, shared or private. If they're not yours, you'll just be removed from them.
   
  
• List numbering and styles.
  Nest lists, start numbering them at whatever you like, and display them as alphabetic, numeric, roman numerals, etc. You can also move list items up and down through the context menu (I just moved this list item up one -- cool!).
   
  
• Blog posting with categories.
  Whatever tags you apply to your documents will now get passed through as blog categories. A very popular request!
   
  
• Selecting viewers to e-mail when publishing.
  Checkboxes let you control who to include in your messages.
   
  
• Various bug fixes.
  Pasted links in the HTML view remain intact; context menus and spelling suggestion menus no longer fall off the edges of the window if they're too close to the side or too long; and more. We also shifted some items between the File and Edit menus, when some of you pointed out our inconsistencies.

Friday, January 13, 2006

• DHTML Dialogs instead of pop-ups (turn ON your pop-up blockers, please).
  The new document still comes up in a separate window, though, as most folks say they like that.
   
  

• In-line comments.
  You can now insert color-coded comments that are hidden when you preview, publish or post.
   
  
• New editor tabs.
  We've reworked the editor tabs to make everything from collaboration to blog posting just one click away.
   
  
• New editor toolbar.
  We've consolidated and simplified it so it's easier to use.
   
  
• Currently selected font face and size show.
  See the current font selections in the new editor toolbar.
   
  
• New table functions.
  Move Row Up/Down and Change Column should help make editing tables much easier.
   
  
• Right mouse click to open link in editor tab.
  You can make sure your links work without previewing, first.
   
  
• The return of private RSS feeds.
  With lots of disclaimers like: Putting this feed up on a public site might allow others to see the titles of your private documents as well as who changed them and when.
  

• Style for right-to-left languages.
  

Friday, December 9, 2005

• Save as PDF.
  Look for 'Save as PDF' on the Action menu in the editor. Note: this is our first to-be-premium feature, meaning it will be part of a paid subsription service once we come out of beta.
   
  
• The beta meter.
  Help us decide when we're ready to come out of beta!
  
  
• Better co-editing collision handling.
  We've fixed some problems and added a pop-up that lets you retrieve your lost changes.
   
  
• More bug fixes.
  Find & replace, the @ sign for Int'l keyboards.
   
  
• More localized FAQs.
  These are now available as a drop-down from the Help Center and FAQ page. We've added Traditional Chinese, Turkish and Vietnamese. Thank you, fabulous volunteer translators!

Monday, December 5, 2005

• Find and Replace.
  Simple text find and replace (regular expressions are also supported).
   
  
• E-mail to a subset of Collaborators.
  Checkboxes let you select just which collaborators to send the message to.
   
  
• RTF Support.
  Upload and Save As in Rich Text Format.
   
  
• A handful of tag bug fixes and enhancements.
  Better support for multiple tags, alphabetic sorting and a fix for the single-quote bug.
   
  
• IE Tab key support.
  As in FireFox, you can use the Tab key to navigate tables and indent lists.
   
  
• The much-requested Favicon.
  (only seems to appear in FireFox -- what's the deal with IE??).
  
  
• Some RSS tweaks.
  Added an additional parameter to include only pulished documents.
   
  
• FAQs in local languages.
  Starting with Slovenian, but more languages to come!
   
  
• Fixes to the jumpy saving status message.
  That was driving us nuts, too!
  
  
• The Remember me checkbox now defaulted to off.
  We also renamed it since it was confusing people.

Monday, November 21, 2005

• OpenOffice document support.
  You can now upload documents into Writely from Microsoft Word and Sun Microsystems' OpenOffice.org, as well as save the documents back into either of those formats. 
   
  
• Vastly improved MS Word conversion.
  Many, many formatting conversion issues have been solved with our new converter, including support for international character sets.
   
  
• Miscellaneous bug fixes. 

Friday, November 11, 2005

• A completely redone Revisions tab.
  You can page through your revisions just like before, but also get a list of all revisions and compare any two. We now display each collaborator's edits in a different background color, and deletions as colored, strike-out text.
  
• Revamped Blog tab.
  A cleaner page layout should make it more obvious how to use it. The option to include the title or not is now global, and a link to edit the title has been added.
  
  
• Revamped Publish tab.
  As with the Blog tab, the layout has been simplified, and a Stop Publishing button added.
  
  
• Many bug fixes.
  Including correct timezones for blog posting, a workaround for Blogger's unbalanced tag touchiness, and working page break insertion on FireFox.
  
  
• Miscellaneous enhancements.
  More fonts in the drop-down menu, full paragraph justification and block quotes.

Friday, October 28, 2005

• E-mail in: E-mail documents, images notes, etc. directly into Writely.
  Technically, we added this at the beginning of the month, but we just now added an icon for it at the top of the page, so no one really noticed the feature before.
   
  
• Added a new User Forum.
  This is a place users can post problems and ideas and to help each other.
   
  
• Writely Help Center.
  This is still just an FAQ-like help system, but now its broken into sections so that its easier to navigate and find things.
  
  
• Better invitations.
  Collaboration invitations should be much easier to read, and help others understand what Writely is.
   
  
• How to create a good password.
  We called out our security policies on the registration screen and added this document to help folks pick a secure password.
   
  
• Bug fixes.
  As usual, we fixed a ton of things. Mostly just little dialog box problems and other problems users wrote to us about.
  

Sunday, October 16, 2005

• Count the number of words in your document.
  One of our top requests -- look for it in the document's Action Menu.
   
  
• Expanded table editing.
  Another top request. We added insert row/column, delete row/column and delete table.
  
  
• Context menus in the document editor.
  Right-click on a table, image or link to get the Change menu, plus the newly-added table editing features.
   
  
• Easier access to archiving and tagging documents.
  We split the Actions drop-down button in the document lists into Archive, Tag and More buttons.
   
  
• On-screen display of your nickname.
  We added a new Hello [you]! link in the page header that links directly to your Settings page (so you can change your nickname if you need to).
  
  
• Expanded Word document conversion error reporting.
  The actual converter error message is now shown, with the hopes that it will help you fix the problem on your own. (We'll still be happy to help if it doesn't!)
  

Sunday, October 2, 2005

• Blogging to most major blog sites, including:
  • WordPress
  • MovableType
  • LiveJournal
  • TypePad is not quite working yet.
    
• E-mail documents, images notes, etc. directly into Writely.
  Click here for your e-mail-in address and start sending your documents to Writely via e-mail. 
• Indicators in the document lists for published and blogged documents.
  Just look for the little colored "published" and "blogged" links.
• An enhanced Actions menu in the document editor.
  We've added Rename Document and a Document RSS link, and renamed some things for clarity.
  
• Handy one-click shortcuts in Collaborate, Publish and Blog.
  Direct links to your RSS feed, published document or blog posting.
• Bookmarks and a better insert link dialog.
  Create anchors and link to them to create richer documents or a Table of Contents.
• New line-spacing formats.
  Single, 1.5 and double line spacing.
• Better blog post title editing.
  Plus, the title is now optional.

Before October