Progress Update #7

With NaNoWriMo in full sprint, it’s already been a busy month for us. We smashed our first milestone, with over 500 million words written in Novlr! (520,133,799 since the time of writing, to be precise). Those numbers don’t include what you’ve imported, pasted, or written into notes — only new words written inside your projects. I think we can all give ourselves a pat on the back for a job well done.

Since our last update, we’ve also made lots of improvements to Novlr, with lots more on the horizon. Here’s a breakdown of what’s new:

Feature Improvements

• Improved our offline functionality, which now allows for the creation and reordering of chapters while offline.
• Improved focus mode for touchscreens. Typing will now fade out the header completely, with a three-second delay when you pause in typing, before fading the headers back in for normal navigation.
• Added extra editable fields to eBook metadata.

Bug Fixing

• Fixed an error that caused words from a split chapter to be counted twice, thereby artificially inflating analytics
• Fixed an issue with offline merges sometimes showing a starting count of zero, which was affecting the correct display of words written vs words deleted.
• Fixed a bug where special characters used in the title when exporting to .odt caused the export to fail.
• Fixed an error where our .docx export squished line heights in titles and headings when opened in LibreOffice.
• Fixed an error on ebook export which automatically labelled the title page and cover image as “fallen”. Also fixed additional .epub validation errors, which affected upload to some platforms.

UI Improvements

• Made co-owner membership cards on the co-owner dashboard shareable.
• Courses no longer show as exportable projects.
• Improved our NaNoWriMo integration with clearer instructions and automatically added it to the assigned Project Homepage for easy access during the event.
• Improved wording around goals and subscriptions to focus less on novels and more on projects to make our language more inclusive for a variety of creative writers.
• Improved some text contrast that was too difficult to read in dark mode.
• Added extra space to the bottom of the writing screen to allow for additional scrolling.

Coming Soon

• Author Pages to give you an easy-to-set-up author website that requires no coding experience or complicated maintenance.
• Custom goals that you can set per project, allowing you to track your own targets in your own timeframe.
• Typewriter mode, which will let you keep your active typing line centred on your screen rather than moving to the bottom.
• Progress emails that will keep you up to date on how you’re tracking with your writing progress!
• We will be switching from daily to weekly streaks to enable more realistic and achievable writing goals. You will still be able to track the number of days in a row you’ve written, but the highlighted streaks will be based on how many weeks in a row you write rather than daily.