

Introducing Copycopter: let your clients do the copy writing - qrush
http://robots.thoughtbot.com/post/3201164937/introducing-copycopter

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jdietrich
FTA: _"At this point, do you try to explain that your master branch has
features that aren’t ready to go live yet? Do you create a new branch based on
the previous stable branch, change your text, deploy that, and then back port
the change to master? Do you tell him he’ll just have to wait until the next
deploy?"_

If you often have cause to think like that, something is _terribly wrong_ with
the way you work.

~~~
geeksam
If I had more upvotes, I'd give them to this statement. However, I'd be
surprised if there weren't a nontrivial number of Rails developers who totally
identify with that. The service is laughably simplistic for my day-job
environment, but it isn't aimed at us. For hosting a four-hour app on Heroku,
that for whatever reason needs to be client-editable, it's great.

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r00k
I went to the actual site without reading the introduction on the blog.

As a user who had no idea what he was about to read, here were my thoughts:

* The tagline below the logo is nearly perfect. Instantly told me what I was looking at.

* Gorgeous design. Love how simple the top section is.

* Plans & Pricing seems too prominent. I know you want me to click there so I can sign up, but ALL I know about the product is what I can guess from the tagline. I think you could remove it entirely (and make the "Next" button in the tour more prominent).

* I didn't really understand what was happening in the "Editing" screenshot. I wished the elements in the shot were labeled somehow.

* When I reached the "Viewing" screenshot, I only knew a change was made because I remembered the original tagline from a previous visit to Umbrella Today. I'm not sure it's clear otherwise.

* Plans & Pricing is gorgeous.

After that, I read the blog post, which gave me a much better overall picture
of the product. It's written very well, though I'll admit raising an eyebrow
at: "at this point, do you try to explain that your master branch has features
that aren’t ready to go live yet?" This feels a little contrived. I think most
folks know not to write long-running features in master, and I have little
doubt that's how you're doing it at thoughtbot.

Just one guy's thoughts, though I am pretty squarely in your target market.

Anyhow, I'm psyched to see you guys launch this. It's clear you're scratching
your own itch, and that's quite promising.

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zach
This is basically localizing your app from developerese into clientspeak,
right? I would think a highly client-accessible Rails i18n solution might be
even more useful.

I'm thinking in particular about tr8n, whose lead developer presented at the
LA Ruby Meetup and blew me away with the level of work that had been put into
the system by the team at Geni. The focus is on crowdsourcing your
translations, and I can tell you that's not at all unrealistic with the
capabilities it has. I did a site with Globalize three years ago and am just
amazed how far a leap ahead tr8n is even without the crowdsourcing aspect.

I hadn't thought about using this for a monolingual site but now I can see the
use.

<http://www.tr8n.org/>

~~~
JonnieCache
_> highly client-accessible Rails i18n solution_

Great idea. I can see it now:

    
    
        ./config/locales/en-dev.yml
        ./config/locales/en-client.yml
    

Slap on a controller and some views to edit it and you're away. Gonna have to
think carefully about security though.

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acconrad
This is great for static copy, but how is the performance? This could be an
awesome plugin for something such as real-time edits to pages on a community
site.

~~~
jferris
It won't affect production performance. It syncs copy in the background, so no
requests to copycopter.com are performed during requests to the client
application.

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richcollins
Great idea but should be wysiwyg.

