The big thing in this release is that we now deliver on the Medium-like user friendliness. No more need to enter HTML markup in an old-style text entry box. Now you select a word or phrase and a little menu pops up with a choice of styles. That's how I added the header to the section below.
The page, as you edit, looks more or less like what the finished product will look like. A big leap in user friendliness.
This is possible because of the excellent medium-editor project that I discovered on GitHub back in May. It's been running for quite some time, and has an active developer community around it.
I was able to ask questions on the project while doing this work and got very friendly and professional help. That's super important. All the other projects I looked at back in March when I was actively working on the MyWord project did not appear to be active. This one is being developed and deployed in other software. That bodes well for its future.
Here's what I am contributing.
MyWord Editor is an open source project, MIT License.
It provides an interface for communicating with a back-end app which is implemented with nodeStorage, also open source MIT License. It's a Node.js app running on an EC2 instance. The API it uses is documented by source code (hopefully at some time it will be documented on a wiki).
It's quite a stack! :-)
nodeStorage is well-debugged and deployed. I use it in my software snacks, released in July 2014, and running fine a year later. BTW, I think Twitter should promote nodeStorage, it brings Twitter to API parity with Facebook, and because it supports storage, and FB does not, actually moves the Twitter API ahead of Facebook. In case anyone from Twitter reads this, my Twitter handle is @davewiner.
MyWord Editor now more or less delivers on the utility of Medium, in a package that technical users could install, as easily as they might install WordPress, for example. I believe we can make it even easier.
There are other nice touches in this new version. Markdown support, which was fully present in the previous version is now only partially implemented. Sorry! :-)
Markdown works within paragraphs, so if you put asterisks around some text, you'll get italic text. And you can put pound signs in front of a headline to get it properly boldened and enlarged.
But any Markdown construct that spans more than one paragraph is ignored. The Markdown model says they don't look inside paragraphs, a good policy. So there's a little bit of Markdown support in here, not full support.
You can now tell MyWord Editor to publish as you go, so you don't always have to tell it to do so. This is more in line with the way I write these days, maybe you too. (It's a setting, you can turn it off.)
The current doc in the History menu now has a check next to its name.
There's a Publish menu, and a New command in the Editor menu, because the buttons had to go, because the editor pane expands to accommodate all the text. This was a very rational change, though I resisted it at first.