Tag: user interface

Serving pages through HTTP/2

This morning (well… extremely early morning, at 3 AM New York time) we rolled out another important upgrade to our front-end servers.

What do we mean by “front-end” servers? These are the servers that are actually serving the Spin Rewriter website with all its subpages to our awesome customers like yourself.

For contrast, the “back-end” servers run the actual ENL semantic spinning algorithms and do all the heavy lifting in terms of running the machine learning models, neural networks, selecting good synonyms given the context of your article, etc.

Anyway, our front-end servers have now been upgraded to support HTTP/2. That’s the newest reliable version of the protocol that’s used for communication between servers and web browsers (e.g. Chrome or Firefox or Safari).

As a result of this upgrade, the entire Spin Rewriter website will load even faster and feel even snappier. I think you’re going to like this upgrade. 😀

Quick Buttons – explained!

If you’ve been doing any manual spinning with Spin Rewriter (and not just relying on our magical One-Click Rewrite technology, haha), you’ll know that there are 3 little buttons just above the list of synonyms for each word or phrase.

Those buttons are called – “Top”, “All”, and “Apply to All”. They’re the bext way to speed up a manual rewrite of your article.

The “Top” button selects all reliable (top) synonyms of the current word that meet one of your three available One-Click Rewrite settings: more readable, recommended, or more unique.

The “All” button selects ALL synonyms of the current word. A second click of that same button then removes all synonyms.

Finally, the “Apply to All” button applies the selected synonyms of the current word to every occurrence of this word in your article. It also pluralizes or capitalizes the newly-applied synonyms where required.

Example – Let’s look at these button in practice:

When selecting the word “book” in your article, you’ll see a list of available synonyms.

Clicking “Top” will automatically select the best synonyms, for example “novel” and “magazine”.

Clicking “Apply to All” will then automatically add these 2 top synonyms to every single occurrence of the word “book” in your entire article. It will also capitalize or pluralize those synonyms as required (e.g. it will use “Novels” as a synonym of “Books” instead of “novel”).

All of this will let you manually rewrite your articles MUCH faster, and with even better results. Enjoy! 😀

Faster animations…

It’s always been our goal to make Spin Rewriter as enjoyable to use as possible.

With this in mind, we’ve spent a large chunk of time recently rewriting our front-end (customer facing) codebase to be even more streamlined and more performant.

As a result, the user experience inside your Spin Rewriter account has become significantly more fluid. All animations are now happening more quickly, letting you know that your actions are taking effect immediately, while also providing lovely UX feedback.

We think you’re going to love the changes. 😉

Improved explanations of features

We’ve been losing no time lately — today we’ve rolled out another update that significantly improves the user-experience of Spin Rewriter users.

Spin Rewriter is (in itself) an advanced natural language processing tool, and as such its underlying technology contains a staggering amount of complexity. And it’s always been our job to make Spin Rewriter not just extremely powerful, but also just as easy-to-understand and easy-to-use.

Our users are telling us that we’re doing a good job with that, and that they vastly prefer using Spin Rewriter to other competing article spinners… but we believe we can always do better. 😀

So we took on the gargantuan task of combing through every last piece of text inside the user interface (that you see after logging into your Spin Rewriter account), and rewording those texts wherever necessary.

We spent countless hours contemplating various options to describe features, to tell you what each button is going to do, and to make sure you always feel 100% in control of the software.

I believe we’ve done a good job! 😀 Go check it out for yourself…

Improved design of the Archive page

We’ve just rolled out an improved design of the Archive page that makes it easier to keep track of all your spun articles.

The new and improved design lets you see more of your article before you even click it, lets you edit the article title in-place, and brings welcome changes and new icons to the control column of the article list.

The list itself has been cleaned up and no longer comes with visible black borders, and the Categories section now hints at the button it belongs to.

Archive page - improved design

This design update required a number of other changes that were all carefully considered to ensure we improve the user experience for all of our awesome customers. Enjoy! 😀

Improved design of modal windows

Time for another UX update — we’ve just improved the design and usability of modal windows (i.e. pop-up windows with additional controls) that you’ll encounter when using Spin Rewriter.

The new modal windows are more scannable, easier on the eyes, and easier to close once you’re done with them (they respond to clicking X, pressing Esc on your keyboard, clicking outside the modal window where applicable, etc.).

I’m pretty sure you’re going to love this update. 😉

New on-boarding animation for new users

As we’re conducting our UX tests and striving to make Spin Rewriter extremely easy-to-use, we’re always doing our best to keep our video tutorials & written explanations up to date.

Sometimes we even add a little “explainer animation” right into the user interface, especially if we think it will help our users discover additional features of Spin Rewriter that they might not know about.

Here’s an example of a new on-boarding animation we’ve just added to Step 2 of the spinning process:
Spin Rewriter on-boarding explainer animation

It shows our new users how they can double-click a word to get the list of suggested synonyms for that particular word. And it also shows our users (very hands-on) how they can use their mouse pointer to highlight a phrase and get the list of suggested synonyms for that particular phrase.

Now, we know some of our users have known this for AGES — which is why we’ve also added a little twist to this animation. The animation will auto-play for new users for the first 3 days with us, or until they’ve used the highlighting feature for the first time.

Once they’ve used this feature, the animation will no longer auto-play. However, it can always be replayed by clicking the little “info” icon to the right.

And hopefully this makes Spin Rewriter even more friendly and easy-to-use. 😉

Big things coming!

Without saying too much, I feel the need to post this short quip about the latest news on Spin Rewriter:

BIG things are coming!

We’ve just finished laying down the roadmap for the 9.0 version of Spin Rewriter which we’re planning to release in October, just like we have for the past 6 years or so. (Prior to that, version updates were on a different schedule.)

The changes that we’ve got planned for 9.0 (and the development of which is well underway!) are going to be absolutely amazing, and I personally CAN’T WAIT to show them what we’re working on.

And now — it’s back to work for us! 😀

Our amazing Perfect Tense integration is just days away…

Our internal tests of the brand-new Perfect Tense integration right inside your Spin Rewriter control panel are incredibly promising — which leads me to believe we’re just days away from enabling the Perfect Tense integration for all our users on our production servers.

We’ll definitely roll out full support for Perfect Tense before the end of February, along with some demo videos that will truly demonstrate its full power, and what the combination of Spin Rewriter and Perfect Tense will do for your content creation needs. It’s going to be truly mind-boggling! 😀

Stay tuned! #exciting

New icons for a sleeker user interface

We’ve just rolled out a design update of some of the most commonly used Spin Rewriter user interface elements.

This also means that some elements just received brand-new, shiny icons to make your experience even more intuitive and satisfying. In addition to that, based on multiple internal split-tests we’ve also streamlined some workflows to work even better for our customers.

We think you’re gonna love these updates! 😀