Initial Observations On The New Vocal Editor

Introduction

I am not a fan of complex editors, and I liked the simplicity of the old Vocal editor. THis has a few updates on new things I have discovered.

This is Justin's release article on the new Editor and more

I liked the challenges it gave me when I wanted to do something different with formats, often going to Google Docs (my favourite editor) and then screenshotting the result and pasting it into the Vocal story.

This contains one example:

While I have Microsoft Word, which I have to use for work (and I hate all the formatting options it has, which seldom seem to work for me), I prefer Word 1, which I think is the originating copy of the software, because it has enough options for me.

So now on to the observations on the new Vocal Editor.

Things I Don't Like

1. The fact that we cannot directly paste images into our stories

2. Autosave. The reason is that it often indicates there are unsaved changes or that they will be saved locally. If you want to be really safe, you need to take an external copy to protect your work. Microsoft Word and Excel have an autosave option, which I always switch off because it slows down the software and sometimes completely locks up the document you are working on. Ofetn we get Unsaved or Saved Locally messages. To force a resave just add a space to the end of the subheading. If it doesn't save, remove it. Any change, no matter how small forces an autosave (which I think must be very resource intensive).

3. The general look of the editor options, although remember this has to cater for every operating system, browser and device, so I will let that go.

4. The continual error messages that turn out not to be true, like when you insert a video. The error message often comes up as soon as you select the option. You paste in the url and it is usually fine.

5. The two options to bring up the menu. Forward slash (/) and the clickable circled plus sign, and the fact that you can't include an image in a bulleted list, which is why there are three at the end of this one.

6. The fact that to insert a link, you have to scroll to the bottom of the options, and I keep thinking I can't select it, but I always can.

7. When you edit an old story and it has a video insted of a picture fr the main image, if you change the subheading (possibly any text) the the save keeps failing. Take the video out of teh heading and put it into the story itself and use a static image (Unsplash or upload) and then everything is fine.

Observations on the Editing Options

It is good to have the heading, list options and undo/redo options at the head of the editor.

These are all the options that can be selected:

Image

The image option gives you the option of searchin Unsplash or using an image on your device. I always using the latter option, and would prefer it to to be ahead of Unsplash.

Video

This is relatively simple but you almost always get that error message which is disconcerting, but you can ignore.

Divider

This just puts a very thin line between sections. Deleting things like this are not obvious, I go to the end of the line before and press the backspace button (I'm on Windows).

Code Block

<a target="_blank" href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/b?_encoding=UTF8&tag=7daysin-21&linkCode=ur2&linkId=fae8eee17e6f300a7755321c33a5cdf4&camp=1634&creative=6738&node=557264">Vinyl</a>

I am not sure what to do to demonstrate this, but it worries me a bit because in theory malicious code could be inserted into Vocal stories. I have added and Amazon snippet from my blog to look for Vinyl records. It's not had any effect but I will play about with it later

Poetry And Verse

This has to be selected before you insert your formatted text. There is no justification or text options but I will include something I did for an old formatted piece:

The formatting and font did not transfer over from Google docs, so I had to manually format it.

Buttons

These are Custom, Share, Subscribe and Author Card and the use is the same. I don;t like the look of them, but they function and they are simple.

Embed Content

This is the one I use most and it is a slight annoyance because it almost always appears at the bottom of the page but it give a full embedded link. This is my blog:

Conclusion

I hope this has been helpful and given you some pointers.

Thank you for reading and for your support.

The accompanying music is "You Can Do It" by Caribou, because you can, we all can.