exitcreative

Over the past while, I’ve been working with some friends on an exciting problem:

How can we make writing on a computer easier and… awesome-er?

A couple years ago, some friends of a friend came to me and my friends (Eric and Kevin, who do fun projects with me from time to time) and asked us if we could design and build a collaborative writing website, where people could get together to write novels. After a good long think, a bunch of meetings around a table in an office we no longer have, and a whole heck of a lot of calls, we came up with a different sort of thing, correcting a smaller problem: it sorta sucks to write on a computer. I’ve tried Scrivener, Writeroom, Ommwriter, Microsoft Word, Pages, Textedit, and others, and none of them really made sense. They all either did too much or not enough. And with Google Wave and Basecamp around, the collaboration thing is/will be nailed.

So now that Will, Ryan and Robbie have gotten the funding out of the way and the development underway, we’re ready to start talking about it.

The first thing I’d love to get your feedback on is some of the initial application screens that detail a bit of the marketing and account management functions of the product.

Homepage:

The bottom bit is the footer, and hopefully the screen grabs/video bits are compelling enough to get people to sign up.

May need some more detail here, though. Note to self. Thoughts?

Welcome Page:

Let’s say you’ve signed up, and you’re ready to write. What’s the first thing you’ll see? This page.

Individual Document Page:

Okay, you’re a pro, you’ve made a few documents. Perhaps you want to compare your work to previous versions, or just edit what you’ve got. Here’s where to do that. The stuff you see on the Version 6 bar: that’s a rollover state.

Old Version Rollover View:

For launch, we’ll only have the most recent version be editable. Too many complications with version comparison…

General Account Admin Page:

And the settings page is pretty straightforward. You can see that we’re trying to have a bit of personality with everything about the site, even for the boring bits.

Password Entry View:

So that’s that. Would love to know what you think.

And of course, stay tuned for details.