Well, vox is in preview, and SA are working feverishly on adding features and fixing bugs. So now's about the time to start suggesting improvements, no?
1. Friends and family just doesn't cut it.
I have more than one group of friends in real life. They get along, but they don't intermingle often. They're into different things; with one group I go out to downtown watering holes, drink pints and talk publishing; with another group I go bowling late at night and hit up Tim Horton's afterwards. I go to movies with different friends than the friends I go to concerts with. And so on and so forth.
So it's just a bit silly that on vox, I only have three bins to use: everyone, friends and family. For a service whose primary selling point is access control, vox's current access control is pretty poor. The ideal, which I never expect to see, is the ability to block individual people from seeing certain posts--so you can, say, plan a birthday present for them (or gossip about them behind their back). But I'd settle for being able to define your own groups, and being able to put people in one or more of those groups. So I can define, say, a group for all my friends in my hometown, or all my high school friends, or all the friends I know who know Torrez. That way, if I'm trying to get people together for drinks in Toronto, my Vancouver friends won't wonder what's going on, or if I make oblique references to crabs, my other friends won't think I've gone insane.
2. "Rich text" editing control = poor man's WYSIWYG
Listen, I know my way around HTML. I'm not afraid of a little markup. And I know what Six Apart are trying to do with the rich text editor: they want to make editing posts as simple as writing a letter in Word.
Those of us who understand the insides of a webpage know editing HTML isn't like writing a letter in Word. For one, a Word document isn't likely to look different on two different computers. For two, a Word document isn't written in some uncomfortably small text box and then pasted into a template after composition. And yet the only option we have for composing posts in Vox? Yep--an editor that tries to act as much as possible like Word.
You know what my pet peeve is about Word? It tries to anticipate what you're trying to do, and fails miserably. The most obvious example is bulleted lists. Dear lord, what a pain that is to get right in Word. But there are plenty of other things Word does that can get in the way of just writing a post. It assumes too much. The nice thing about writing straight HTML is that the editor assumes nothing; you have to tell it explicitly, through the use of <strong>, that you want a piece of text to be bold. If you want a new paragraph, you use <p>. If you want it to begin after the album cover floated on the right, you add a CSS style to the paragraph: "clear: right". I want to have this control over Vox, but I can't because I'm locked in this tinkertoy construction zone that is the rich text editor.
I turned off the rich text editor in WordPress because it was getting in the way. I want to do the same in Vox.
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