Hello! Today we are excited to announce our new version of the Riter app. We hope that you had time to evaluate and enjoy the previous updates and actively use them in your projects. Do not forget to send us your ideas and suggestions if you are missing something during your work with the tracker. At the requests of our users we have added some features and fixes to it.

Use filters for quick searching

As you remember, the previous Riter version allowed you to use some simple filters for searching stories by users, states and so on. Riter also began to support several filtering aliases to simplify your work. Adding a special symbol or a keyword to the request string specified a criteria of search. Now we have added one more filter which works in the same way. It makes it possible to search stories by topics. Add a symbol # before your query to look for stories with such a topic. You can also list some topics separated with a space in a string. If a required value is not found among topics, it will be searched as just a title. Nevertheless, you needn't enter the entire topic name - specify a part of it and Riter will autocomplete it if possible.

Keep in mind that if the search criteria belong the same type (a state, a topic, a name or a title), stories will be shown if they include at least one match. Otherwise, the application will search for stories which match all the criteria. As the result of searching, you will get a list of project stories that corresponds your request. The page structure will remain the same. To return to the whole stories list you need to clear the search bar.

File uploading

File uploading can be used to attach additional materials to a story description and explain a task in more detail. You can upload different types of files but a size of each of them should not exceed 100 MB. We are sure this will be enough for all your needs. You can attach files by dragging and dropping ones to the editing form or selecting them through an open file dialog. A link to the file in a markdown format will be generated.

For uploading and storing data we use our other program product - Vault8. It uses Amazon S3 as long-term storage and supports security-signature protected URLs to ensure safe processing of your files. Moreover, as an image oriented service, Vault8 allows you to apply the necessary filters to an attached image just from the Riter editing form. Some of them will be added to a generated image link by default: autoorient and resize_fit. The last one will set the image size to 1920x1080. You can easily change the values, remove unnecessary filters or add some other ones. Visit the Vault8 documentation to learn more about other opportunities.

Optimizations and fixes

We appreciate time of our users so we optimized Riter to make it faster. In this version our team succeeded in reducing time of stories loading on the main project page. We could decrease the number of SQL queries by using lazy-loading and pagination solutions. Now Riter loads data gradually and almost unnoticeable for users, only when they are really required.

We have also fixed the following issues:

• Using actual filtering alias in search. Of course, you expected to get a list of all "draft", "estimated" and "in_process" stories. Therefore, we can imagine how disappointed you are, when only "draft" tasks were displayed instead. Now the problem is solved - check it out for yourself!

• Another problem you could notice were extra empty lines during file uploading. Though they didn't disturb your work, they didn't look very attractive so we removed them.

• A problem with non-ASCII symbols in filenames is fixed as well!

• And finally, we forbade you to mark an approved story with a question sign. An approved story cannot be unclear a-priory. All controversial issues must be resolved during the process of implementation or even earlier.

Stay tuned for updates on our blog and good luck with your projects.

Riter development team