App Update: quit reading, clear notifications, news at a glance
Today on BetaBooks we rolled out two small changes a lot of people have asked for, and one thing just for fun.
1. You can now "quit reading" a book.
Previously readers could "mark as read," to remove a book from their sidebar and "Books I'm Reading" list. However, some readers felt that was disingenuous if they actually hadn't finished the book.
Also, books that you "marked as read" still showed up on the dashboard in the list of "Books I've Finished."
As we've had more writers doing group swaps and workshops, etc., there have been more cases where it made sense for a reader to really "quit" a book. We also had a handful of situations where readers ran out of time, or had life changes that made it inconvenient for them to finish.
Both of these cases are handled better now. Down under the table of contents you'll see new buttons that let you mark a book as read OR quit reading. If you decide to quit, you can even leave a little note explaining why.
2. You can now clear all notificaitons at once.
Keeping track of activities in the books you're working on is super helpful, but dismissing notifications one at a time can be tedious if you are doing a lot of work on BetaBooks and therefore get a lot of notifications. Well, starting today there's a "delete all" button on the dashboard that will let you clear out all those notifications in one click.
3. We now show links to our three latest blog posts on the dashboard
You'll now see this just above your notifications listed as "BetaBooks News." The main goal here is to make it a bit easier for people to find out about new features as they ship, rather than finding out later in our occasional email newsletters (or never finding out). The secondary motivation is it may help us remember to write more blog posts :)
We'll try it for a bit and see.
Paul and I hope you guys enjoy these little refinements on the site. If you have any thoughts or feedback, please let us know via email, we'd love to hear from you!
