Hello, my dears!
It's been a while since we released an update, but today is the day! Meet Story Architect 0.5.4 with Teams, a cool redesigned card dragging mechanic and a bunch of other improvements on board!
But before I tell you about the new release, I'd like to thank everyone for actively participating in the life of the project! It's cool that you share your comments, suggestions, ideas, participate in social media discussions and talk about the project! The last few days were really busy, so we haven't had time to respond to everyone yet, but we'll definitely respond to everyone! Your emails and messages are very valuable to us. Thank you!
Studio version
So, as we told earlier, we're now working hard to adapt the application to studio needs.
The first step was the implementation of the team management feature. This is necessary to ensure that all the studio's employees have full access to all the features of the application, regardless of their personal subscription to the service. Also, it simplifies the process of coordinating authors when working on a large number of projects.
Once teams are set up, new projects can be placed within teams, organizing them and giving the right group of authors access to projects at once.
In the list of projects teams are displayed as groups with projects inside them.
Right now we provide access to the Studio version only by request. If you would like to make processes in your studio/author room automatic, let's discuss it via email or social media (support@starc.app).
Dragging and dropping cards
If you've worked with cards in previous versions, remember that dragging and dropping them was not very convenient, especially when working with acts and multiple sequences due to the fact that the application tried to immediately rearrange the document structure by moving the card to a new location.
Besides, an additional inconvenience was the fact that behind the cards flying around on the screen, it was easy to lose the place where the dragged card was originally placed.
In the new version, all of these points are no longer relevant.
Now cards don't fly to new places until you let go of them. And the place, where the card will be put in, will be easy to see, because the other cards will move apart.
This change gave not only improvements in the usability of the cards and their responsiveness, but also made it possible to remove multiple application crashes when moving cards between each other.
Saving Characters and Locations
When working with large multi-part projects, it turned out that when you automatically save characters and locations, the project's bible gets overloaded with unimportant entities.
The initial assumption and solution in the form of a list of only the main characters and characters from the text of the series turned out to be a kind of half-hearted solution that helps only when working with the text. Therefore, another improvement of the new version is the ability to abandon the automatic saving of characters and locations during typing.
Characters and locations from the script text will still be present in the dropdown lists when working on the text.
You can set up saving or turn it off in the settings of each of the text modules.
Other improvements
And a few other improvements that were made as part of today's release:
- options for more customized tuning of the displayed character and location name tooltips are added;
- an ability to access a specific project document (in the context menu of the documents) is added;
- by default, the audio drama duration is based on 140 words per minute;
- when working in split mode, the order of the characters and locations is now stored within each script, and does not affect the general lists of characters and locations;
- the angle of the watermark is adjusted, so it is located exactly how everyone is used to see it;
- numerous improvements to the export of audio drama in PDF format is made;
- displaying the navigation on the contents of a folder text is now prohibited, because it often led to confusion with the contents of the folder itself;
- an issue with unexpectedly logging out of the account is fixed;
- an issue with displaying settings of script and comic book modules is fixed;
- an issue with exporting line numbers to PDF is fixed;
- logic of the scene numbers skipping is fixed;
- a crash when renaming characters/locations is fixed;
- a crash when searching for all characters/locations in project scripts is fixed;
- a crash that would cause saving characters with a space at the end of the name is fixed.
Whoa!
Update the app and let's move on, darlings! :)