Yarny version 1.1 is now live in the Apple App Store! After what seemed like an eternity, the new version of the Yarny app has been approved by Apple and is now available for our premium subscribers.

This version should fix an issue a number of our users were having which would cause the app to repeatedly fail with a “you must be logged in to do that” message. We’ve also introduced a number of new features and improvements to improve your writing on the go.

New features include:

• Added additional support for renaming and coloring snippets
• Added next and previous snippet navigation when in edit mode
• Improved view of groups in snippet lists
• Better handling of keeping a user logged in
• Numerous bug fixes

Yes, just in time for Valentine’s day, the iPhone and iPod Touch companion to Yarny are now available. With this app, you’re never apart from your creative works. Use it like you would those index cards you carry around in your pocket or that special little notebook you won’t leave home without.

Here are some of the features we have in 1.0, with 1.1 right on its heels.  
• Access all of your titles and their groups and snippets 
• Easily move among your Story, People, Places and Things lists 
• Read and edit your writing 
• Create new snippets and write new text 
• Remain signed in so you can quickly jot down notes and thoughts 
• Display your snippets showing the colors you assigned to them 

When we first created Yarny, we knew it would be wonderful for novel writers. Since our launch, we’ve found our users writing all sorts of things in Yarny. Here’s some of what we’ve found:

• Novels 
• Short Stories 
• Biographies and Memoirs 
• Magazine Articles 
• Blog Posts 
• Poetry 
• Lyrics 
• Research Papers 
• Letters 
• Long, Important Emails 
• Notes 
• Character and Location Descriptions 
• Inspirational Thoughts 

Here’s what you’ll need to run the app:
• Yarny runs on iPhone and iPod Touch with iOS 3.2+ • A Yarny premium subscription is required. Visit yarny.me and sign in with an existing account to upgrade to Premium. 

As always, please send your thoughts and questions to us at support@getyarny.com

Love, 
The Yarny Team. 

A new premium feature added this week is email forwarding. You can now send emails to your Yarny email account and the email will become a new story snippet on the title you most recently accessed. To get started, select Account Settings from the drop down menu that appears when you click your email address in the upper right corner.

The Account Settings window appears. Click Generate. 

To find your Yarny forwarding address, just select Account Settings from the drop down that appears when you click your email address in the upper right corner. Copy that email address to your address book, so it’s easily accessible. Then, just send emails to it, and Yarny will add them to your most recent title as a story snippet. 

When Yarny creates the new snippet from your email, it will use the subject line as the snippet name. We released a few more changes this week too.

Getting Started Video

If you’re wondering the best way to get started using Yarny, take two minutes (even less, actually) and check out the new video. You can see it on the getyarny.com homepage, and also access it from within Yarny.me. Just click “?” (Help)  in the global bar and select Getting Started Video. 

Share to Google+

When you open shared writing, you may notice a Google+ icon in the lower right.

Yep, due to popular demand, you can now post the shared writing link to your Google+ account with one click. 

Keep the Feedback Coming

As always, we’ve made some more tweaks to make Yarny the best writing environment for you. We’re hard at work on some very cool new things , so stay tuned. In the mean time, let us know what you are thinking. Email us at support@getyarny.com, or click Feedback from within Yarny.

Love,
The Yarny Team 

We continue to enhance Yarny with more free and premium features. Today, we released public sharing, duplicating snippets, groups and titles, and more.

Public Sharing

Easily share your writing with just a few clicks. This feature is available to all subscribers, free and premium. Simply click the Sprocket icon next to any snippet or group and select Share.

Once you do, you’ll see the Sharing icon appear on the group (or snippet, if you’re sharing a snippet), and a box will appear showing a URL. Click the URL and you’ll see your writing nicely formatted and displayed for viewing on computers and mobile devices. Click the Facebook and Twitter icons on the bottom of the shared page to post the link to your social accounts. Copy the URL and email it to your friends. 

The shared view is updated every 10 minutes, so your readers can see as your story progresses. If you decide to Unshare, click the Sprocket icon again, and select Unshare from the menu. Your writing will no longer be shared. It’s that simple.  

Duplicate Titles, Groups and Snippets

Ever want to make a copy of what your working on and freeze it, while you continue to work the next version? As a Premium user, now you can. Duplicate snippets, groups and titles as many times as you want. Just select Duplicate from the Sprocket menu of snippets and groups, and from the Title List drop down.

Duplicates are also great for creating your own templates. For example, let’s say you want to always record certain information about your characters. Create a Title with your own templates, and just duplicate it for each new project. 

More tweaks

We’ll never stop tweaking things here. We’ve made numerous adjustments here and there. See something you want changed? Let us know. Click the feedback icon inside of Yarny or email us at support@getyarny.com. Have a great weekend. 

Love,

The Yarny Team

Beginning at midnight tonight, and for a period of 24-hours, when you visit Yarny.me and GetYarny.com you will see a black screen. This is what our site and app could look like under legislation currently making its way through the US Congress. Hearings are scheduled for January 18, prompting a wide protest movement by individuals and companies devoted to making the web a free, open, and creative environment. Blue Burro, maker of Yarny, and The Yarny Team, are such. 

We are all for protecting original works. In fact, much of what we do here at Blue Burro is work to protect your writing in Yarny from technical loss, theft and malicious attacks. We don’t believe though, that the US Congress, in its attempts to stop digital piracy with these proposed laws granting the government broad censorship powers of internet sites, will achieve it’s stated objective. Rather, we believe it creates a slippery slope that could lead to a dark, censored internet.  

Please pause when you see the black screen, before clicking through, to consider what broad US Government censorship powers could mean for your use of Yarny and the internet in general. 

We have included links on the black-out screen for you to learn more about this legislation. Regardless of where you are, please be part of the many who will light up the phones and deluge the in-boxes of members of Congress regarding SOPA/PIPA. Please use your wonderful literary talents to fully express your feelings. 

Thank you.

Love,

The Yarny Team

support@getyarny.com

We know that our users love to write. Actually, we know that our users love to write LOTS. We also know we don’t get everything right the first time. During the past few days, we have been reminded by some of our users that early on we had said that unlimited titles would always be free. So, we’ve raised the number of titles our free users can create to, well, infinity.

Remember too, that you can export your writing as a plain text file and as an RTF file. Also, for those of you that haven’t tried it yet, put *one* set of asterisks around words you want italicized and **two** sets of asterisks around words you want to be in bold. When you open an exported RTF, you’ll see the formatting. 

If you want to get a taste of  premium features, themes and sounds, you can for just the cost of a cup of coffee (grande, mocha, Cappuccino). Click Upgrade to Premium after signing in and choose the monthly plan. You can switch back to the free plan anytime during the month and still enjoy the rest of your month on Premium (all for just the cost of that cup of coffee).  

Happy writing. From all of us on the Yarny Team, we wish you the Happiest of Holidays.

Love,
The Yarny Team

Yarny 1.0 Now Live 

Although a few days later than we had first planned, Yarny 1.0 is here. Complete with new features for free users and also a Premium subscription to access even more features. 

New in Yarny (Free and Premium Features)

Here’s a quick list:

Features available to everyone (free and Premium)

• Font Styles
• Font Size
• Italics and Bold in Export
• Export in RTF (MS Word, Pages and other word processors)
• Up to three titles, unlimited words

Premium Features (subscribe inside Yarny)

• Typewriter sounds
• Themes (starting off with one, adding more soon)
• Unlimited titles, unlimited words

NaNo winners get 50% Off

All 2011 NaNo winners get 50% off of a Premium annual subscription. When you register, just enter your NaNo username. It’s a simple as that. 

New Support Center

We’ve rebuilt our support site to provide you with faster access to your questions. Of course, we’re still available via the in-app Feedback and support@getyarny.com. 

Redesigned Forums

We’ve also rebuilt our forums on a new platform that makes our forums easier for you to use. Find our forums here. 

Join our Featured Writers

Check our our Feature Writers page on getyarny.com. If you want to be listed, send us what you can or care to of the following items:

• Your name, age, city, state/province and country
• The URL of your blog or website, if you have one
• Describe one or more recent projects you have written in Yarny
• What parts of Yarny you find most helpful 
• Anything else you’d like to add
• Include a photo of your beautiful self

We’ll publish as many as we can on the GetYarny site.

For Parents, Teachers and School Administrators

In the first part of 2012, we’ll be releasing the first set of sharing features, allowing one to share writing privately and securely. This means, students can submit writing assignments to their teachers and professors all from within Yarny. (We’ll be talking more about how all writers can use the new sharing and collaboration features when we release them in the first part of 2012).

If you are a student; a parent or guardian of a student; or a teacher, professor, or administrator please help us spread the word. Sometimes, school administrators need to talk to us before they approve the use of Yarny. Just email us at support@getyarny.com or call us at (01) 904-825-9900 with any questions.  

Love,

The Yarny Team

A very big **Thank You** to the thousands of beta testers who have helped us over the past couple of months. With your input we have found and fixed bugs and prioritized enhancements on our roadmap. At the end of next week, we’ll be leaving beta and Yarny version 1.0 will be released. Yarny’s first production release includes some of the premium features that we have planned, with some big premium features to follow the first part of next year. Yarny will always have a very feature rich, free version. In fact, next week, we’re releasing new features for the free version too.

We also made some changes this week. Mostly, they included backend enhancements. However, you may have noticed that now, when going to yarny.me, you are redirected to a 256 bit SSL connection. This means that all of your writing, not just your username and password, is encrypted as it travels back and forth from your computer to our servers. Just one more thing we’ve done to safeguard your writing.

Be a Featured Writer

We have received many great stories about how our customers are using Yarny, and we want to share them. We’re adding a section to our website called, you guessed it, “Featured Writers.” To be included, just send an email to support@getyarny.com and tell us as much of following as you can or want:

• Your name, age, city, state/province and country
• The URL of your blog or website, if you have one
• Describe one or more recent projects you have written in Yarny
• What parts of Yarny you find most helpful
• Anything else you’d like to add
• Include a photo of your beautiful self

We’ll publish as many as we can on the GetYarny site.

For Parents, Teachers and School Administrators

From the beginning, we have built Yarny knowing that it is a perfect fit for education. Yarny is free, it’s secure, there’s no advertising, it works on most any computer with a modern browser, it eliminates the cost of buying CDs and jump drives, and it fits most any writing method that is being taught. Even the Terms of Use are school administrator, teacher, and parent friendly.

In the first part of 2012, we’ll be releasing the first set of sharing features, allowing one to share writing privately and securely. This means, students can submit writing assignments to their teachers and professors all from within Yarny. (We’ll be talking more about how all writers can use the new sharing and collaboration features when we release them in the first part of 2012.

One of our lofty (read, “we don’t get much sleep”) goals is to make Yarny the most widely used writing tool in classrooms around the world. If you are a student; a parent or guardian of a student; or a teacher, professor, or administrator please help us spread the word. Sometimes, school administrators need to talk to us before they approve the use of Yarny. Just email us at support@getyarny.com or call us at (01) 904-825-9900 with any questions.

Shop the Yarny Store

With the launch of Yarny 1.0 next week, we’re opening a small, online Yarny store. Walk around wearing your Yarny t-shirt and hoodie, proudly identifying yourself as a forward thinking, cloud using, creative writer.<strong>Give the gift of Yarny</strong> by buying a one-year gift subscription for that special writer in your life.

New Forums

We have upgraded our forums to make them easier to use. We post important stuff (and sometimes not so important stuff) on our forums and also on Twitter and Facebook, and we watch them all for any feedback we receive. We work hard to respond quickly.

Love,

The Yarny Team

We know you are hard at work on your novels, blog posts, short stories, articles, and other creative writing endeavors. We want to take just a moment to let you know what we are doing to make Yarny better for you.

Last week during our maintenance outage, we put in place some monitoring that is helping us track some of the bugs (big and small) that some of you may be experiencing. As it turns out, the most common cause of these bugs is slow or finicky internet connections. To some of our users, it may seem like Yarny is getting buggier, not better. With the new monitoring though, we can tell that, for some of you, it’s the increasing size of snippets making slow internet connections become more of an issue. You’re writing a lot in Yarny and that’s great. It also means a lot more data moving around on your internet connection.

To address this, we’ve come up with a suite of fixes that will help even slower connections work better with Yarny. Note though, an internet connection speed about equal to that of a 3G cell phone or home DSL connection is about the slowest you will want to use. At this connection speed, if you have large snippets (say, half of your novel is in one snippet), then pause when clicking the version button, or bouncing to another snippet, just to make sure you don’t get too far ahead of your computer. On faster connections this isn’t an issue.

Connection speed is not the only thing we’ve been dealing with. We’ve found some other things in our code that we’ve tweaked to better keep the myriad background tasks from getting jumbled as you click around inside Yarny.

As some of you have already noticed, that quite bothersome “snippet jump” bug still lives. We are doing our best to kill it (this time for good).

At anytime, if you get nervous about your work not saving, or your internet connection dropping, just click the Export icon on the bottom, right corner of each snippet list and your writing will be downloaded to your computer. It’s like taking a snapshot of your writing, just in case. We hope that helps. Keep writing, and keep telling us how you feel about Yarny. After all, we created it for you.

Love,
The Yarny Team

On November 11 at 5am eastern (GMT-5) as planned, we turned off everything Yarny to install some maintenance fixes. We’re continuing to work on some big time improvements, and until we release those, we’ll periodically inject fixes to eliminate known problems and annoyances. Overall, it took longer than we expected, which means we interrupted some of you from your normal writing schedule, but it was time well spent. Here’s what we did.

Improved exporting

Some Yarny users were experiencing problems with line breaks not exporting properly. Now, they won’t experience those problems.

More obvious “not saving” message

For now, Yarny needs an active internet connection to work reliably. Offline usage is one of those things we’re hard at work on, but it’s not quite ready. In the mean time, to ensure our users know when their connection goes down, or any other reason that their writing is not automatically saving, we’ll pop up a big warning. This will get your attention, but don’t worry. The best thing to do if you do see this is to copy the text from the current snippet to some text editor or word processor and then logout. Log back in when you have an internet connection and check the last snippet you were working on. If needed, copy and paste in any writing that was not saved.

Snippet jumping

Relatively harmless, but very annoying, is the bug we’ve come to call “snippet jump.” Some of you have experienced this when Yarny jumps to the first snippet even as you are typing on another snippet. Others are experiencing a jump to the first snippet when they click back to Yarny from another browser tab. Now that we have this one under control, snippet jump, as a technical term, may fade into oblivion.

Some behind the scenes things

We’ve also put in place some more technical stuff that’s quite boring to talk about and even worse to write about, so let’s just say it’s there to help prevent problems and handle them better if they happen. Of all the things we’ve addressed on this list, this is actually the most important to creating a peaceful writing environment for you. But, like I said, it’s just too boring to discuss further.

SSL security

With SSL security in place, all of your writing will be encrypted as it flies back and forth between your computer and the cloud. We take great care to secure your data on our servers: this is another step we’re taking to protect your writing while in transit. We completed the first phase of getting SSL implemented during this outage, with the final cutover scheduled to occur soon.

Counting words

As the writing tool of choice for thousands of NaNo competitors, being overly generous with word count is not a good thing. We tweaked our word count algorithm to more closely match the one used for NaNo. Speaking of word count, that same mildly generous word count algorithm, along with some egregiously wonky math, put our homepage word counter into the stratosphere. We are eating our humble pie this morning and dialing it back to a triple-checked recount. The actual number was just over 38 million words. Now, we’re really looking forward to our 100 million word celebration (again).

Love,

The Yarny Team