Latest App Features Update (v1.1)
Newsletter 008
At the start of 2024, we spoke with a few select writers about their Switch-Lit experience so far and based on those in-depth conversations, we’ve improved the platform with some new features that are now active!
Mini drumroll please 🥁…
Updated URL → switch-lit.com
We’re officially out of “beta” which means we’ve finished our initial testing, received finished stories for publishing in the Switch-Lit Library (coming soon), and most important to know for now – we’re no longer using beta.switch-lit…
You can access Switch-Lit simply via switch-lit.com moving forward.
24 hour email notification
Are you unsure of how much time you have left to write your chapter before it gets “locked”? You’ll now receive a friendly email reminder when you have 24 hours left for your turn to write the next chapter.
Text editor: “Preview full text”
Underneath the title of your story in progress you’ll notice a “Preview full text” button. Click it and a new browser window will pop out with your entire story-in-progress to serve as a helpful reference beside the active chapter in your writing canvas. Adjust and position the pop-out window for a lo-fi, split-screen effect.
Text editor: “Focus mode”
In the upper right corner of your writing canvas, you’ll notice a new “focus mode” icon. Click it and your writing canvas will expand to fill the screen, hiding the left side navigation, so you have the option to write on a more clean, minimalist canvas.
Final edits autosaved
When you finish the first draft of your story, you and your partner get a chance to take one final pass to edit your own chapters. During that process, if you leave the text editor page for whatever reason, fear not for your edits will now autosave so you don’t have to edit all of your chapters in a single sitting.
“My Library” sharing options
After you a finish a Switch-Lit story, you will now find it in your personal “My Library”, where there are two new options:
1) “Submit to us” will submit your story to us for editorial review and consideration to be published in the official Switch-Lit Library.
2) “Copy 🔗” will copy a unique URL link so you can share your finished private Switch-Lit story with others online.
Final story page design
Every finished Switch-Lit story has an updated design that transforms a playful process into a professional look and feel, featuring your original cover artwork generated by code that represents the two writers’ shared world.
See a live version of the sample privately published story below here.
Mobile design tweaks
For all of the writers and poets who prefer to write via their smartphones, we’ve begun to clean up various nooks and seal some functional cracks throughout the mobile experience… and will continue to do so!
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Explore these new features for yourself and alongside your partner in the enchanted forest of your next Switch-Lit story :)
Ken
Editor, Switch-Lit
Featured prompt:
Prompt 3
In April 1974, designer Tomohiro Nishikado wanted to go beyond the shapes of “Pong” so he created the first video game to represent character players as pixel-like human sprites. Write a storyline for a video game about a world of rectangles who suddenly discover they may rearrange themselves into something more.
by Switch-Lit
Did you know?
In computer graphics, a sprite is a two-dimensional (2D) bitmap image that is integrated into a larger scene or background, most often in a 2D video game.
This original use of the word sprite was coined by two engineers of the 1979 Texas Instruments TMS9918 video display processor because of the characterization that sprites "float" on top of the background image, like a mythological sprite or ghost, without overwriting it.
Don’t give up.
“The thought of two things that merge, mutually altering each other, two things that, intermingled and interactive, become one thing that does not age, brings me to think of the nature of intimacy. Isn’t it often in our most intimate relations that we come to realize that our identity, all identity, is combinatory?”
– Forrest Gander, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and translator
Contact us:
📟 Ping us with any questions, requests, or proposals for Switch-Lit:
editors@switch-lit.com