October News

Overall usage figures for Textise continue to rise. Some comparative figures:

Textise Page Views
Month	2010	2011
July	4,342	12,920
August	4,076	13,256
September	3,381	12,325
October (1 – 23)	3,036	9,427

Around a three-fold increase, then. Pretty good.

Apologies to those of you using the Windows Phone 7 app. If you’re using the new OS (Mango) you’ll notice that the ‘Skip to content’ feature isn’t working. At the moment I have no idea why! I can’t find anything in the specs to indicate a change to the webbrowser class that could cause the problem.

If you use the Textise home page you’ll have noticed a spinny globe showing visitor locations. I realise that this is yet more clutter on the page but I couldn’t resist it. It only shows visits to the home page but I think the geographical spread is really interesting.

On a slightly different note, my new app is now available for the Windows Phone 7. It’s called Quits and it’s designed to help you to give up your bad habits. I’ve already used it on one of mine and it really works! Future plans on the app front include strategy game Goblin Harvest (now probably destined for the Windows 8 tablet) and a music app for the iPhone/iPod/iPad. As for the novel I’m s’posed to be writing and the new Television Of Cruelty recording, well…

Oh, by the way…

First up, apologies for the recent outage on both the web-site and the WP7 app. This was due to some serious problems I was having with the web service. I’m still unsure whether it was caused by me or my hosting company: the problem was intermittent, which suggests something wrong at their end, but it came right after I republished a tidied-up version of the code. Maybe we’ll never know! One thing I can tell you, though, is be very careful when using SVN for your source control. Guess who, in the middle of this crisis, clicked Update when he wanted Revert? Well me*, obviously. I didn’t realise for quite some time, but this had the effect of flooding my project folders with inappropriately-placed duplicates. It was a right mess until I had the good sense (at around 5:00am) to delete some stuff.

During my difficult evening, I went on my hosting company’s live chat in the hope they could help. The support person first suggested I re-start my computer. He then asked me to check my broadband connection, in spite of the fact that we were chatting on-line at the time. I told him that errors were still occurring and that my users were unable to use the site. He suggested I tell my users to restart their computers. Genius.

Sales of the WP7 app have taken an upward swing after 1800pocketpc.com published details. I’ve actually been sending out press release emails, which seems to be working. The app’s now at version 1.2 and allows you to choose which engine you use for searches (Bing, Google or Yahoo).Google now only occasionally blocks Textise so I thought it worth the gamble!

The latest problem I’ve seen is with pages consisting of a header containing a redirect. Textise renders these as blank pages (no content, y’see) instead of following the redirect. Might see if I can fix it at the weekend. Might not.

*I know, I know – dodgy grammar.

DO YOU LIKE Windows Phone 7? DO YOU LIKE Textise? Well…

It’s out! The WP7 Textise app is out! *proud*

Not sure if I should be (proud), though. Don’t know if anyone’s buying. But it’s there – on the Marketplace – and that’ll do for now. Here’s one place you can see it…

The release version is v1.0 and I do have plans for a variety of improvements, so if you’re thinking of buying it please bear in mind that you’ll also get all future refinements for your money. These may include:

• Pivot view
• Landscape orientation option
• Favourites
• Choose search engine
• Swipe to go back/forwards

I have a few other ideas and I’d also be very happy to consider any suggestions you might have.

In other news, the Georgia Commission for Service and Volunteerism is now using Textise for its text-only option. Great to see it being used for such a good cause.

And finally… I’m still struggling with encoding/character set problems. I thought I’d found a happy medium whereby the web site and WP7 app both worked happily with a variety of sites but yesterday evening I found yet another problem. I continue to ponder and will hopefully have one of those epiphanic moments soon. Or find something in a forum suggesting I reinstall Windows.

Textise WP7 app – ‘Testing in progress’

I’ve gone and done it now, haven’t I? I’ve submitted my app to the Windows Marketplace where it’s being tested. Or possibly not, this being a Sunday, although I suppose it’s possible that the little Microsoft testing elves are cruelly made to work 7 day weeks. Here’s hoping!

I had such fun, reading through the lists of prerequisites and dos and don’ts and not likelies*. Had to make three logo images, all in different sizes (not that hard, I’ll grant you) plus screenshot PNGs showing the WP7 emulator screen (but not phone chrome) at 100% (created using the W7 snipping tool), plus write full description and featured app text (as if that might happen!), etc., etc. Must ensure that app title in the manifest is the same as in the submission, must close my eyes and count to 3 before hitting submit…

But now it’s all done and the waiting begins. I’ll let you know.

One thing I’ve added to the app was a “skip to content” feature. This (optional) option scans the incoming web page for a link to an internal bookmark that reads “skip to content” or “jump to primary content” or something like that. The app then grabs the target of the link (something like “#maincontent”) and navigates there automatically. This method only works on sites that have taken the trouble to include “skip” links but it works brilliantly for the BBC site, Independent and Guardian (although not the Guardian front page due to an error at their end – and never sorted out by The Red Prince** when he was Mr Tester Man!).

I’ve also added the “skip” feature to the main web site. I don’t know if you’re going to like it and, at the moment, it’s not optional (unlike the WP7 version). I think it’s much better but please let me know if it really messes with your Textise experience.

In the meantime, I’ve also been having the most enormous fun with HTML encoding. To start with, the new app was displaying all sorts of weird characters so I had to do some explicit conversions of quotation marks and the like to their HTML equivalents. Then, Textise user @drizo72 got in touch to ask me why this Greek web site wouldn’t convert properly. The answer is, I don’t know at the moment. One thing I do know is that I’ve made it slightly worse by putting a new rule in to change weird characters into pound signs (so amazon.co.uk looked better): now the whole page looks like an economist’s breakdown. It’s a bit of a weird site anyway (far too many redirects and nonsense for my liking) but it does concern me that Textise isn’t coping at all well with non-Latin code sets. More forum trawling for me, then…

(Postscript: Guess what, the snipping tool made correctly-sized images but left a bit of my Windows toolbar on the bottom. I only realised this when I added the screenshots to this post! I’ve fixed them now but, of course, the messed-up versions have already gone off to Microsoft. *sigh*)

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* No, I don’t know if you spell it like that but it’s not a proper word anyway so there.

**He knows who he is.

Textise WP7 app – nearly done

Worked quite a lot on the app yesterday and today (yes, working – for you! – on a Bank Holiday Weekend).

Most of what I wanted to do for the first release is now done and it looks sort of like this..

That’s a terrible picture, isn’t it? It was taken using the webcam on my new Samsung R540 laptop, which is fabulous for the money but won’t help me win any photography competitions.

Anyway, the app has Textise and Search buttons (just like the web site), a recent history list and font size selector. All in all I’m pretty pleased with it and it helped me learn a lot about WP7 programming. Expect it to hit the Marketplace sometime soon (-ish)!

Textise WP7 App – now in development

I’ve started work on a Textise app for Windows Phone 7. I’m a big fan of the WP7 (in spite of some slow updates) so I’m quite excited about writing my first app.

You can see how far I’ve got in the screenshot. I originally wanted to use a white background to maintain consistency with the way Textise looks on the Web but I’ve read that too much white can eat up battery life so decided to go with the standard WP7 black. (Black, it’s all BLACK! BLACK! BLACK!) Downside is that I’ve probably got to create a reverse logo.

Like the web version, Textise on the WP7 will have a front page (Home) where you can type/paste in a URL or search term. Bing will be the (only) search engine because it’s the WP7 standard and Google have blocked Textise…

I’m hoping to get most of it finished this weekend, after which I’ll start on the long, long road to the WP7 Marketplace. I’ve already registered, paid, verified myself (had to send a signed kidney to a company called Geolocate) and unlocked my phone.

I still need to have a think about whether to charge, how much to charge, whether to offer a trial, whether to produce a free “lite” version and a paid “full” version (with, say, bookmarks), whether to go with adverts. Quite tricky.

If this goes well, I’ll consider doing an iPhone app.

In other news, you can say “bye bye” to the Hello Bar. They reduced the functionality so I’d pay them. I didn’t. No great loss, I think.

Ta ta for now!

New Page For Web Developers

The new page, For Web Developers, is now fully updated. An important new feature is the “notextise” class, which allows developers to control what gets converted to text on their site and what gets ignored. This means that they can offer a neatly formatted, text-only view of their pages without all the untidy navigation links that often clutter up the page.

This is also useful for “printer-friendly” links.

I’ve also created a test page for the “notextise” class: have a look.

In other news, I recently fixed a few things:

• Rogue styles and classes in tags (for example, in anchor tags) are now zapped.
• Fixed a problem with an initial “>” in text-only output.
• Info from the web service is now returned as an HTML comment.

You’ve been Googled

This is all very sad. I think Google have started blocking Textise. They do this apparently, if they suspect bot behaviour, or – as I assume is really the case – if their firewalls suspect bot behaviour.

This means, of course, that Google searching from the home page is no longer possible. Worse than that, though, you can no longer Textise Google results. Now, you might take the view that Google results are already pretty much text-only, which they are, but some people will prefer to go into text-only (Textise) mode and stay there.

The fact is, I’m always concerned if any sites fail with Textise. And Google… well, it’s one of the biggest, right? Disappointing. I’ll see if I can sort it.

On a happier note, Textise is now in regular use in Vietnam. Usage figures have, in fact, gone through the roof since our new Vietnamese users came on-line. Hello Việt Nam!

Introducing the Textise Bookmarklet

Want to know the great thing about Firefox? It’s that you can write add-ons for it without messing about with Greasemonkey or something. So, when I wanted to offer users the ability to toggle in and out of text-only mode, I wrote a Firefox add-on. Thing is, whenever I was using another browser (I’m known to occasionally dabble with Chrome/Rockmelt and Safari), I’d get frustrated about how difficult it was to go into Textise. If you’ve had to do it, you’ll know what I mean: copy the URL of the page you want to view text-only, go to the Textise home page, paste in the URL, hit “Textise”. Just so hard!

So I got to thinking (happens after a couple of beers) and the idea of bookmarklets occurred to me. And you know what, this was very, very stupid because, back in 2009, one of you (jlemoine to be precise) had suggested this very thing on the Feedback and Suggestions page. Oh well, I caught up in the end.

The happy ending here is that I’ve written the bookmarklet and you can go get it on the new Bookmarklet page. What’s more, it contains exactly the same code as the Firefox add-on. Doesn’t look so nice (the add-on can can have a nice image in FF) and doesn’t have right-click menu functionality but it works on all the browsers I’ve tried and should be really useful if you like to flick in and out of text-only mode.

Let me know how you get on with it.

Extra texture!

I’ve made a couple of changes to Textise recently. The first one is the addition of optional textures. This feature allows you to view text-only content on a background of your choice. In the screenshot, we’re viewing a BBC news article in MV Boli font on manuscript paper. Quite Olde Worlde, I’m sure you’ll agree.

You can choose a background from the new drop-down list on the Textise Options Page. Most of the ones I’ve uploaded so far are rubbish, though! The manuscript’s good but I’ll have to replace the others when I can find some better (and free) alternatives.

The other change I’ve made is to replace paragraph tags – which were previously deleted – with DIV tags followed by a line break. This helps retain bookmarks contained in paragraph tags and also breaks the text up the way the original author formatted it.

Just a reminder: if you haven’t already, please fill in the Textise Poll. Thanks!