Tag: user interface

Updated exports and dowloads

We’ve just rolled out yet another quality-of-life improvement when it comes to using Spin Rewriter.

If you’re looking to download multiple articles from your Archive of spun articles inside Spin Rewriter, you no longer need to download each individual article separately. With this most recent update, you can now simply select multiple articles inside your Archive and click the “Download Articles …” button that appears automatically — and all of your selected spun articles will be instantly downloaded to your computer.

Go ahead & give it a try, it’s pretty cool! 😀

Setting category for multiple articles…

We’ve just rolled out another feature that makes Spin Rewriter just that tiny little bit more powerful, and tiny little bit more delightful to use — and as we all know, over time these little quality-of-life improvements add up to a genuinely amazing product.

Inside your Archive of spun articles, you’re no longer limited to clicking each individual article in order to set its category. Setting the category of individual articles is fine if you always set the category of an article as soon as you’re done spinning it — but sometimes we can all be a bit lazy, and then we’re suddenly left with 20 uncategorized freshly spun articles, 16 of which we might want to assign to the same category.

With this most recent update, you no longer have to click 16 different articles in your Archive and select the exact same category 16 times in a row. You can now simply select all 16 articles and then use the “Change Category of Articles…” button that shows up automatically — this way you’ll be able to assign a category to all 16 articles in a single move.

I hope you like this update. 😉

A visual update to our Quick Buttons…

Most users of Spin Rewriter are already familiar with our Quick Buttons… which are the 3 almost-magic buttons that make the spinning process so much easier and so much faster.

While they’re absolutely great once you start using them, we discovered that a significant number of our users never got around to discovering them and putting them to good use… and we can’t really blame them:

Quick Buttons - before

These are the buttons we mean. The “T”, “A” and “R” buttons next to the input field for new synonyms. They’re used to instantly and automatically select “Top” synonyms of the current word… or to select “All” synonyms of the current word… or to “Replace All” occurrences of the current word in the entire article with the synonyms we’ve just selected.

So yeah — while they’re powerful, they’re not what you would call prominent. And we simply had to change that. Voilá:

Quick Buttons - after

I’m just going to say it — this is much better now! Not only are the buttons more prominent… and not only they actually tell you what they do, in full words. There’s also a little blue question mark that you can click, and that tells you (in detail!) exactly what clicking each of the powerful Quick Buttons does.

There’s even an example to make things clearer — so let me paste it right here:

When selecting the word »book« in your text, you’ll see a list of available synonyms. Clicking Top will automatically select the best synonyms, for example »novel« and »magazine«. Clicking Replace All will then automatically add these 2 top synonyms to every single occurrence of the word »book« in your entire article. It will also capitalize or pluralize those synonyms as required (e.g. it will use »Novels« as a synonym of »Books« instead of »novel«).

I hope you guys will love this update! 😀 And we’re actually already working on three other similar updates to the user interface, where we can significantly improve the user experience by slightly tweaking the location and the wording of different buttons and inputs. Stay tuned! 😀

Mobile friendly – check!

Spin Rewriter users seem to be a serious and business-oriented bunch! 😀 Why? Because even today, in 2017, we’re only seeing less than 5% of all traffic coming to our website from mobile devices such as smartphones.

The remaining 95% of our visitors are using either powerful desktop machines, modern laptops, or sleek tablets like the newest iPads… which means they all get to take in the full Spin Rewriter experience. Which is awesome!

However, should the 5% mobile users suffer for it? Absolutely not! I’m sure that all of us occasionally check our emails on the go, on our smartphones… and if there’s an email that looks interesting enough, we tend to click through to see what’s on the other side. So, at any time we can end up on a website that hasn’t been optimized for mobile devices and that either doesn’t load properly, or gives us a terrible experience. Which is NOT how we do things around here. 😀

With this in mind, we’ve just pushed out a further-improved mobile responsive = mobile friendly version of Spin Rewriter that guarantees an awesome user experience regardless of the device you’re using. We think you’re going to love it!

We’ve further improved JavaScript performance

With the vast majority of popular internet browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer / Edge, …) finally getting wide-spread support for some of the latest JavaScript features, we’ve decided to completely revamp our JavaScript code to bring it from the current “state-of-the-art” to absolutely “cutting-edge” status once again.

We’re always looking to squeeze every last bit of performance out of our code, be it with the back-end code that runs on our array of servers, or the front-end JavaScript code that runs inside our users’ browsers and helps them use Spin Rewriter to take care of all their unique content needs.

So, if you’ve noticed an improvement in responsiveness of forms / buttons / other interactive elements you come in contact with inside the Spin Rewriter control panel, now you know why. 😉 Enjoy!

Improved integration of our image database

We’ve just rolled out another update to the built-in database of royalty-free stock photos and images that’s available to all users of Spin Rewriter. With this update, we’ve made the integration even better — not only is there a large number of photos available now, but we’ve also implemented query caching in our back-end infrastructure which means that we’ve managed to speed up the entire user experience when it comes to adding relevant images to your generated spun articles.

I hope you like the update! 😉

We’re now officially MOBILE READY

Hooray!

The mobile version of the official Spin Rewriter website now passes all tests when it comes to delivering a truly great user experience on mobile devices with small screens.

You’ve seen some of the changes that we’ve recently rolled out in my previous post on mobile responsiveness, and today I’d like to share this with you:

Spin Rewriter - Mobile User Experience

Spin Rewriter – Mobile User Experience

The result of the test above means that our website now passes all challenges that stood in our way on the path to a truly great mobile user experience. From large and friendly texts, generous whitespace, larger targets for links and buttons… which also includes a completely redesigned header and footer of the website… all the way to mobile-optimized images and so on and so forth.

Thanks to everyone on the team who had a hand in delivering these updates, and we couldn’t be more excited about it all! 😀 Hope you like it!

Spin Rewriter – Mobile Beta

As I mentioned in my post last week, we’ve been hard at work rolling out proper mobile responsiveness and a truly GREAT user experience for users of mobile devices when using Spin Rewriter.

We’ve just rolled out the first public beta version of our full-mobile support, and here’s what the changes look like so far:

Spin Rewriter - Mobile Responsiveness

Spin Rewriter on mobile devices – Before and After

As you can see, the header of the website has been completely redesigned. We went from displaying small links to subpages that are hard to read, to having a big, friendly “Menu” button that displays all of the available subpages in an easy-to-read format.

We’ve also entirely redesigned the footer of the page — jump over to SpinRewriter.com website on a mobile device to check it out. 😉

Other than that, we’ve done a ton of work to convert all parts of the websites into a format that delivers a great experience on mobile devices. This includes larger fonts, paragraphs with more white-space, larger “targets” when it comes to clicking links and buttons, optimized images and backgrounds, etc.

Hope you like the progress, and we’ll definitely keep you posted! 😀

Mobile responsiveness for Spin Rewriter

More and more people are using mobile devices such as phones and tablets to do the majority of their internet browsing.

This recently resulted in a big (and very helpful) trend that Wikipedia is calling responsive web design. What it means is, websites should be able to adapt to the device they’re being viewed on.

If someone is visiting a website from the tiny screen on their mobile phone, the website should shrink down and rearrange in a way that makes fonts nice, big and readable, while pushing the less important bits of the website towards the bottom of the page. The visitor can still find and read all parts of the website, they’re just structured differently and in a way that allows for a great mobile experience.

Spin Rewriter has always been designed in a way that allowed for a decent mobile experience — but not necessarily a great one. And we’re always striving for perfection.

This is why we’re working crazy hard on bringing proper mobile responsiveness and a truly GREAT user experience on mobile devices to Spin Rewriter as soon as possible, and we’re quite confident we’ll be able to roll it out even before Spin Rewriter 7.0 goes live on October 12th!

Here’s to progress! 😀