Help videos and a bundle of fixes to style guide, baseline and commands

on Monday 30th of July

This week we’ve released a collection of videos to make getting started with Typecast easier as well as debugged a few features – just to tighten things up.

New video tutorials

We’ve just posted four new videos to help you get to know the app and find everything you’re looking for. You can find them in the footer once you log in. They’re titled:

• Meet the Interface
• Adding and Structuring Text
• Choosing Fonts
• Styling Typography.

These show you where all the basic features live and how they work. More videos are on the way and will cover things like how to design using inheritance and how to use the baseline grid.

Fixes to undo/redo

A bug crept in that prevented you from undoing more than one style command. Instead, if you CMD+Z twice in a row, the app would undo, then redo. We’ve got this working again so there’s no limit. You can undo all of your previous style commands.

The app was also raising an error whenever you’d undone or redone all prior commands yet still attempted to undo/redo. We’ve fixed this issue too. 

Alpha now appearing in style guide

We discovered that whenever you created a custom class, like a p.intro, and then changed the alpha, the colour was being recorded in the style guide, but not the alpha value. But this one’s now fixed and alpha is now being documented properly in the style guide.

Baseline corrected for long content

Grid lines were misaligning once you scrolled down about two screens worth. To fix this we replaced some javascript and a .css plug in, which should also increase performance by using a lot less code.

Problems loading projects on Safari

on Friday 29th of June

We’ve identified a bug in Safari that’s preventing some users from loading their projects. Until it’s resolved, we suggest using Chrome.

Our developers are investigating the problem as we speak. So far we’ve isolated the problem to the secure connection we use in the background to save changes to your project. There appears to be a small difference in how Safari handles a secure web socket connection. As a result, the browser simply closes the connection to the server when you attempt to load a project.

Here are the symptoms:

• You can access the dashboard, but when you select a project the editor loads and stays on “waiting” without the project appearing.
• You can load your project, but changes you make are not saved. This happens because the project data is returned before the browser raises the error. Most features will continue to work, but changes aren’t saved because the browser isn’t sending any commands to the server.

As soon as we know more or have a fix in place we’ll let you know. You can check back with us here, on our Status Blog, or on Twitter.

Inheritance, classes, paragraph styles & more

on Monday 28th of May

Today we released a mixture of updates and new features that will make your experimentation process swifter and the code you handover cleaner.

Here they are:

• inheritance;
• removal of preset elements;
• a CSS reset;
• container duplication and classes;
• indents and exdents; and
• undo and redo

Inheritance should cut down repetition in the setting of your styles as well as repetition in your code, which means faster progress for you and cleaner code and faster loading for your site. For more details on this, plus our new, unstyled elements and the CSS reset, check out our blog post.

Our container changes are a big step forward. They’ll let you compare fonts or font combinations as well as explore responsive states faster than before!

New indent and exdent controls are the first in a series of paragraph styling improvements that we have planned. More to come!

And finally, we’ve got undo and redo of styles working in Typecast now, which means it’s quick and easy to rub out anything you don’t like or bring back anything you do.

Connectivity improvements

on Wednesday 23rd of May

We’ve just released a fix for users having trouble opening or creating projects.

Typecast uses a websocket connection to save each change you make to the server, so everything you see is happening in real time. But as support for websockets is still pretty new, some networks and browsers don’t behave as expected. This has caused difficulties for some users, preventing them from opening or creating projects.

To fix the issue, we’ve changed things to use a secure connection behind the scenes. This should make eliminate the vast majority of connection issues.

If you’re still having trouble opening or creating a project then we’d love to help. You can get in touch through our diagnostic tool.  

More stable pasting & Myriad Pro weights now available

on Wednesday 2nd of May

A number of you reported problems with pasting last week. You should notice a big improvement with today’s release.

The pasting bug caused a few different behaviours. Either:

• the text didn’t paste, but a new element box appeared; or
• the text didn’t paste and you were unable to then click on any element boxes in the containers.

Some of you trying to paste below ‘the fold’ experienced the same problems, except the screen also jumped to the top of the container and you had to scroll back to your insertion location to discover your text was absent.

With today’s fix, you should be able to paste using any method (right-click and with CRTL+V). In addition, pasting below the fold has improved. The screen will jump momentarily, but return to your insertion point on its own.

Inline styles

The pasting bug also affected the links in our pop-up inline styles menu. For some of you, when you applied one of the styles, that style would immediately turn itself off. Not good. But that’s fixed now too.

Myriad Pro weights

Till today Typecast was only serving up Myriad Pro in its Regular weight. But the family offers many more. So today we’ve added the other five weights to the family plus four variations of these for you to experiment with.

That’s all for this week. We hope these changes make using Typecast a little easier for everyone.

Safari 5.1 bug affecting Typecast users

on Wednesday 2nd of May

If you use Safari 5.1 on Windows, you may have encountered this error message while using Typecast.

Please note that this error message is from Safari, not Typecast. It seems a bug in Safari 5.1 sometimes logs PC users out of sites mid-session and then produces this message. Our users have encountered it when they’re in a project and then try to return to their dashboard.

This page offers a good explanation of the problem and instructions on what you can do to fix it.

Users Getting ‘Oops’ Errors

on Tuesday 17th of April

You might encounter error messages today when accessing your projects.

Yesterday morning we released changes to help projects load faster. However, we’ve just noticed that sometimes they’re loading too fast for Typecast features inside (like fonts and the style guide data) to catch up, and it’s creating a synchronisation problem.

As a result, some users are getting an ‘Oops, something went wrong’ error message and being logged out, unable to access the project.

Our guys are working on the fix now, and we hope to release it by end of day.

Sorry for any inconvenience, and thank you for your patience. We’ll keep you informed. 

Disruption of Service April 12th

on Friday 13th of April

If you were unable to use Typecast yesterday, we’d like to apologise for the disruption of service. 

Last night GMT, our server automatically restarted itself yet didn’t issue a notification. When it restarted, not all of the services restarted correctly. Fixing this required manual intervention from our systems guy early this morning.

While users were able to log in and see the dashboard, they were unable to open projects and access the editor.

We’re pleased to say everything is now running normally, and we’ll be spending the morning figuring out what prevented the alert so we can avoid a repeat of this issue in future.

Thank you again for your patience and understanding, and we apologise again for any inconvenience caused.

Introducing versions and an improved colour picker

on Friday 30th of March

We’ve got two BIG changes for you this week. Good times!

Keep your drafts

You told us you needed to be able to save your work and see previous versions, and we listened. You can now save and view versions of your project as well as revert to an older version at any time. 

Better colour control

Our original colour picker wasn’t a bad start, but we knew there was room for improvement. This week we’ve removed the pre-set swatches and have replaced it with an advanced colour palette that includes alpha control. 

See our blog post for pics and more details, or log in to try them out for yourself.

Network upgrades may affect Typecast on March 29th

on Monday 26th of March

Our network host will be upgrading its systems between 11pm GMT on Thursday March 29th and 6am GMT on Friday March 30th. This may affect Typecast’s performance and availability during this period.

If there are any issues, we’ll let you know and get things moving again as soon as possible.

A fresh look for the blog and a page for getting started

on Thursday 22nd of March

This week we’ve released changes that better explain how Typecast works and make parts of the site a bit easier to use. 

Our blog

We’ve freshened up our blog’s look and feel and to make it easier to browse. 

Changes to the sidebar now highlight our best articles and offer better descriptions of additional resources. And we’ve added a section for videos from industry experts on design and typography. 

Getting started

To make it easier for new users to start using Typecast, we’ve added a Getting Started page. It features the same new Getting Started slide deck that now appears in the dashboard – so those who don’t yet have their account can still discover how Typecast works. There are also sample projects and FAQs.

Footer changes

Finally, we’ve updated the site’s footer – moving some items around and adding gallery thumbnails.

For more details and a few pictures, check out our main blog post.

Our story, beta info & a new orientation deck

on Thursday 15th of March

Our latest additions help you understand Typecast better and explain our vision.

We’ve been listening to your feedback, and our most recent releases have included important changes that tell you more about Typecast and make it easier to get started.

Orientation Deck

Yesterday we released a new orientation slide deck. It quickly sets out how our app works compared to the drawing or coding tools you might be used to. We think it’s more helpful than our previous walk-thru slides, which you may recall looked like this:

If you’re logging in for the very first time, this new orientation will appear automatically on your dashboard and look like this:

If you’re an existing user, it won’t automatically launch when you log in. But you can open it by clicking the ‘Show Getting Started’ link in the top right of your dashboard.

New About page

After a lot of questions like ‘Who’s behind Typecast?’ and ‘How did you come up with the idea?’, we’ve shared our backstory and our vision for Typecast in our new About page. We’ve even included a few staff photos so you can see who’s designing, coding, testing and writing all of this stuff.

About our beta 

There’s also a new About the beta page that explains why we’re running in beta, how long we’ll be in beta and other beta-related facts.  

That’s all for now. More next week!

Fixes for more reliable project access

on Monday 12th of March

We’re constantly working to improve Typecast’s performance and reliability.

Here are a few of the fixes we released today to make using Typecast easier. 

Project access

Last week getting into projects and staying in them was hard work. Many of us encountered the ‘Reload’ window or ‘Log Out’ window repeatedly during sessions.

This was a server authentication bug which we believe we’ve now fixed. If you continue to experience these error messages during your sessions, please let us know by using the ‘Give Feedback’ link.

Downloaded fonts data

When you download a project, you get a list of the fonts you’ve used and which font provider each is from. We noticed that sometimes fonts were being listed as system fonts when they were not.

We’ve amended the code that generates the fonts list to fix this. If you encounter inaccuracies, please let us know.

Team access

Some users who were invited to join another user’s team were having difficulty accessing projects. This was due to a permissions error, which we’ve now fixed. If anyone you’ve invited to join your team can’t open your projects, make sure to tell us.

First visit: difficulties opening projects

on Tuesday 6th of March

Some users are having trouble creating a new project and opening the Goldilocks Sample project during their first visit to Typecast. This is the case even when a firewall is not in place.

We believe it’s an authentication issue and we’re working to replicate the bug and build a fix. Until then, logging out and logging back in appears to resolve the issue.

Difficulties working on lower resolutions

on Wednesday 22nd of February

Users working on lower resolution monitors have reported problems using the editor.

Two type of problems have been reported:

• The main dialogue box overlaps and obscures the editing area.
• They can’t toggle the pop-up inline styles menu for bold, italic and hyperlinks. It appears partially or totally off-screen. When they scroll to access it, the menu disappears. When they select text a second time to view the menu again, the scroll bar jumps back left, placing the menu out of view once more.

We originally designed Typecast for screens set at 1280 x 768 and higher. However, we believe in offering the best experience possible given the capabilities of the device, and so we’re looking into how we can remedy this issue.

Until it’s fixed, anyone without access to a larger monitor should create a second column in every new project. Leave the first column blank and work only in the second column and beyond.

Doing so will leave your editing area clear of the main dialogue box.

For the pop-up menu, when you scroll right to expose the menu better, it’ll still disappear, but when you click the text a second time, the menu should appear and remain in view.