Some weeks you build a big new feature — and some weeks you finally make the house you already built properly liveable. This was the second kind. Not one spectacular new button, and instead a pile of things you notice immediately: pages that open rather than assemble themselves. A way to buy that finally sits where you'd look for it. A new platform. And a reading bug someone reported that we would never have spotted ourselves.
The big one: OutaStory got noticeably faster
If you've opened the home page in the last few days, it may have felt different. Not "prettier" — faster. That was the single largest piece of work this week, and almost all of it sits below the surface.
We looked at the home page from the outside, the way a phone on a bad train connection sees it. The result was sobering and instructive at once: the page wasn't slow because it does a lot — it was slow because it carries a lot. So we cleared it out:
- Images that match your screen. A phone now loads a cover sized for phones instead of one sized for a desktop. Cover art and profile pictures ship in a modern, far leaner format. That alone accounts for most of the data the home page used to cost.
- Less back and forth. The catalogue on the home page now arrives in one ready-assembled delivery from the server instead of many small follow-up questions. For you that means the shelves are there when the page is there, rather than trickling in one after another.
- Only load what's needed. Charts, error reporting and similar machinery are no longer loaded on every page — only when they're actually used.
- Smaller over the wire. Content is compressed, our stylesheet was boiled down, and static files now sit closer to you instead of making the long trip every time.
- Categories in stages. The long category sections on the home page now load in portions rather than building everything at once.
None of this is a feature you make a video about. But it's the difference between "I'll have a quick look" and "I'll look again later" — and that's the difference that counts.
OutaStory is now in the Mac App Store
As of this week there's a native Mac app — straight from the Mac App Store, with its own window, its own icon and no browser around it. That puts us in five places:
- Web — www.outastory.com, everywhere
- Android — Google Play
- Windows — Microsoft Store
- Fire tablets — Amazon Appstore
- Mac — Mac App Store (new)
The iPhone and iPad versions are still in review with Apple. While we were there we also tidied up signing in: on Apple devices "Sign in with Apple" now comes first, because that's the route people expect on an iPhone — and because Apple would like it that way too.
Premium can now be bought inside the Android app
This is one of those small things that isn't small. Until now you could use Premium everywhere, but buying it always meant a detour to a web payment page. In the Android app you can now buy it directly — through the payment route your device already knows, with the payment method already stored there, and managed in the same place as your other subscriptions.
If you already have Premium via the website: nothing changes. Your access still works on every device, and it's still managed where you bought it.
An author showed us a bug we'd never have seen
I enjoy telling this one, because it's exactly what feedback is for.
An author published his first story and then wrote to us: the text contained spaces he never typed. And at the end of a page, the last line wasn't filled out. His conclusion: surely the layout should be stored exactly as it was entered.
He was right on all three counts — and, to our own surprise, both observations had the same cause: a single invisible character.
Text fields in a browser store a typed space as a so-called "non-breaking space" under certain conditions — especially at the end of a line, when two spaces follow each other, and almost always when text is pasted in from a word processor. Such a character looks like a space but doesn't behave like one: a line is not allowed to break there. Hence the spacing nobody typed — and the short final line, because our page splitting couldn't break at exactly those points and ended the page too early.
It's fixed now at the point where the text is displayed. That matters: it means already-published stories are repaired automatically — nobody has to retype or re-upload anything. On top of that, the platform now notices by itself when a chapter is affected, so we find these things before someone has to report them.
If you've ever wondered whether an email like that is worth sending: it is. Very much so.
For everyone who writes
Turn a published story into a serial. Until now you had to decide at publishing time: standalone story or serial. Anyone who changed their mind later was stuck. From now on a published story can be converted into a serial after the fact — chapter by chapter, with subscription and notifications for your readers.
A publishing path that no longer dead-ends. There was a situation in which someone couldn't publish — and the field that would have fixed it was greyed out. Both are sorted.
Your stories are legible in the overview again. On large screens the action buttons in "My stories" had crushed the title column to zero width, so titles simply weren't visible. Also fixed.
For everyone who reads
The 16+ gate explains itself now. Opening a 16+ story without a birthday on file used to produce a "page not found". That was not just impolite but plainly wrong — the story does exist. The page now explains why it isn't visible and what to do about it.
No more ads on mirrored classics. A large part of our catalogue is freely available German-language classics that we mirror. We no longer show any advertising on those texts. It's a matter of decency: if you're reading a public-domain work we didn't bring into the world, you shouldn't be paying for it with ad space.
Old links work again. Addresses from the platform's early days that still carried a language code in the path led nowhere. They now redirect properly instead of showing an error page.
Where things stand
- Five platforms — web, Android, Windows, Fire tablets and, as of this week, Mac. iPhone and iPad are in review.
- Over 8,000 stories in the catalogue, in German and English, many of them with an audio version.
- Six releases this week — unusually dense, because many of the improvements were small enough to reach you immediately.
- One author's note that found two bugs at once.
What's next
Two things are top of the list. First, iPhone and iPad — the review is running, and we hope to report something final next time. Second, we're staying on speed. The home page was the most obvious place, but it isn't the only one; the reading view and the catalogue get the same treatment.
And otherwise, what this week demonstrated so nicely still holds: tell us what looks odd. Even — especially — when it feels petty. Without that one email we probably wouldn't have noticed the spaces for months.
Thank you for reading, for writing, and for looking closely.