my review of @ellipsus-writes
what i was looking for: an easily accessible, free online platform for sharing my work with beta readers and proofreaders that allows them to add comments and chat in real time
what i like: sleek design, great mobile compatibility, toolbar at the bottom makes it super easy to highlight, insert line breaks, and more. text is also double spaced by default, which makes copy-pasting into ao3 super easy.
they have a pretty impressive range of dyslexia-friendly fonts, which is nice!
you can add descriptions to docs to make searching easier, as well as organizing into folders
more superficially, i enjoy the wide range of custom colour themes. it's actually quite refreshing after years of dark/light mode being the only options
they've recently upgraded to using passwords, which is huge! since they ditched email codes i've found myself using ellipsus a lot more
what i don't like: ellipsus has started releasing new colour themes bi-weekly. they make what i guess you'd call a moodboard to advertise these themes on their social media and fail to credit the photographers of the photos they use. maybe i'm just petty, but i think it's pretty shitty given how much of their marketing centers around being "artist first" and against genAI scraping.
some friends have mentioned being unable to access some of their docs during times of high traffic. they did regain access later, but i would recommend always having an offline copy of your work regardless. at the end of the day, ellipsus is a cloud storage startup that's still quite new
when i first started using ellipsus, i found its drafts system confusing. it's grown on me overtime and some friends swear by it, but i think there's a bit of a learning curve there, esp if you're coming from google docs
the main difference is that collaborators can't suggest edits the same way you can in google docs. they can edit 'drafts' of the main work, which you then have the option to compare or merge with the original. tbh, my beta just leaves comments when i've made a spelling mistake. we find that easier
also, i am slightly annoyed by them adding new themes instead of focusing on improving the user experience
what i hope to see fixed:
there's a glitch when highlighting text where the highlight cuts off the last few words or letters of whatever chunk of text you're highlighting that's super annoying
the little red dot doesn't disappear from the notifications symbol, even when notifications have been read. it's a little distracting
i've had issues in the past with quotation marks automatically being formatted as straight quotations instead of curled. now i've found that curled quotation marks only face one way. for example:
overall: i'm pretty happy with ellipsus! it does everything i wanted it to, with the added bonus of beautiful themes and sleek user interface. i've even recommended it to some writer friends, and they enjoy it is well. all my gripes are pretty minor; at the end of the day, ellipsus does what it's meant to do, with easy collaboration and a wide range of cosmetic customization
