Welcome to Chowa Widget
On the middle of the left side of the screen while writing, there's the new Chowa Widget. It is a set of features that was implemented with the writer in mind, which help improve the writing experience. The widget is auto-enabled in the Chowa Blogging Editor. We want to make sure that writers that use our platforms have the necessary tools to facilitate the development of blog posts.
So yes, we've been reading your comments. We started with three features.
1) Writing Mode
When you click on the first icon of the widget, you will notice a few elements will be removed from the page. Writing mode is a toggle where you can remove elements that may distract you from writing such as the HackerNoon footer, the post's featured image, posts topic selection, etc. All these elements take a lot of height of the draft page, so hiding them will be a good idea for writers who need to concentrate on just writing. If you want those elements back, simple hit the toggle again.
2) Read Aloud
Clicking on the second icon of the widget will read your draft aloud. Hearing your blog post can help identify what edits are needed and what to write next. This will assist in organizing your thoughts, catching misspelling faster, and improve sentences. This will also help our great editors when reviewing these blog posts. There are no limit of how many times you can use this feature, since it uses a synthetic voice api provided by the browser, hence no marginal cost is associated with it.
3) AI Feedback
This one is totally new for all HackerNoon Writers. Clicking on the third icon of the widget will produce a feedback of your drafts. This will evaluate how your draft is doing, help you understand what can be improved by giving you Weaknesses and Suggestions, and even give you additional ideas that can help you strengthen the draft. This feedback is based on the expertise we've gained from publishing 120k+ blog posts via the Editing Protocol and uses one of our favorite AI models - can you guess which one it is? This feature is capped at 3 tries (can change in the future) for all writers and is enabled when the draft reaches 200+ words, giving the opportunity to get a polished evaluation of your draft before going live on HackerNoon. You should definitely try this one and give leave us a comment!
Other Text Editor Updates
Chowa Editor now support Graphs/Charts directly. You can see a Chart Icon on the Toolbar of the editor. You can now enter and organize your data by formatting it in a graph representation. There are 4 types of graph Line, Bar, Area, & Pie.
Here is a simple one: My top Programming Languages of all time (sample)
There have also been improvements make to the editor itself, now its full height and some bugs were fixed. Chowa toolbar now uses all icons from our Pixelated Library and they look more consistent.