The Typer

I like to use "simple" text editors rather then word processors to write, I use TextMate on OSX and TextPad on Windows, adopting the OPML editor when i need to track structure. But when I saw Writeroom I was struck with its beautiful design and essential feature set, I thought that it would have been great if such a kind of editor existed on the web (I was constantly using gmail drafts to jot down notes while not in my office). I found that many others around me are doing pretty much the same so I decided to go on and build one myself.

The main purpose of this service is to allow anybody to write notes and text on the web. Its purpose is to capture the essential spirit of writing and distill it in a web application. You can access your documents from any browser and they are automatically saved. You can have them spell checked and you'll soon be able to store various revisions of each one.
Each document can have its own style (background/foreground colors, font size and family) and you can generate a public url for your document to share with anyone a read-only version of it.

Its interface is built around a configurable writing area covering most of the page with the exception of a small menu which can be collapsed to remove most of the extraneous elements from the page (it's best use is with the browser in full page mode!). Have a look at the help for more details of TheTyper features.

All the service has been programmed by myself using Ruby on Rails.

The tools I did use were:

• RadRails and Textmate for the programming part,
• Paint Shop Pro for the graphics
• MySQL and MySQL Administrator for the database
• Subversion for the code repository and versioning.

Other than Writeroom In this work I have also used, customized, took inspiration from the work of other (wonderful) developers:

• Black Mirrored icon set by Björn Seibert
• Prototype-based rich text editor by Pelle Braendgaard
• Lightbox Gone Wild! by Chris Campbell
• Color Picker by Matthias Platzer

The service is currently hosted on a linux VPS at Railsmachine

A rough help is here, I hope to have made TheTyper simple enough to be self-explaining however if you need help, please ask me at luca@thetyper.com (then it'll turn into a faq!).