Hello, my darlings! :)
It took us three weeks to finish document changes work! And I’m really glad we overcame this challenge!
I bet you are now wondering what it even is and why it is so important that we spend so much time on it.
Well, if you take a look at most of the editors, you will see that files with data are only the output the author worked on. The magic undoing the last step works until the user closes the program. It works differently in Starc – when the author changes something, the program addresses both the text of the document and the change information.
It’s necessary for several reasons.
The first one is to secure authors from losing their texts. As we know, files may be damaged because of power failures or running out of disc space, or any other reason, which is often unprompted. The backup protects from many of these things, but it doesn’t work always, unfortunately. But when you have the changes data in the file, you can open the previous steps and form the text, even if the last ones were damaged.
The second one is to provide collaborating and work with the document together with someone. There are different ways of providing online collaborating. We made it the following way: authors send each other not the whole texts, but only edits, applied on the other computer and copied on the server. This solves the problem that both authors must be online while working with the document, so the author may work offline, when every change is saved on your computer first and in the cloud second when the internet is available.
The third one is to provide working with the changes history itself. Starting with any information of changes history available for the user: which change was applied, when and by whom. And ending with undoing the last step even after a reboot. So you may not worry when you accidentally import text instead of exporting it, or when your cat runs across your keyboard and deletes the whole text. You can open the program and undo the last step whenever you want.
Furthermore, it was necessary to make the whole scheme as universal as we can, so we can provide all the above-mentioned changes not only for the screenplay but for any document, whether it is a text note or a mind map.
And now, after abandoning some decisions because of weak productivity or extra complexity, we have found the one which performed well in the most difficult tests and I want to give you all a hug! :)
This small step brought big happiness and an increased charge of energy for further achievements!
Onwards and upwards! Stay tuned!