Seldom does a programmer have the privilege to use his own product in a real-life situation, but as an Australian living in Sweden I am often asked by friends and colleagues to proof read or even translate text. I was recently asked to proof read a short text for a friend who works at Myra Industriell Design, an early adopter of TextFlow. I promptly fired up TextFlow and devoted half an hour to fine tuning and polishing the text. I was quite proud of the minor adjustments that, in my eye, really made a big difference to the text. Imagine, then, how disappointed I was when WeaveSync just clobbered all my changes together into two big yellow blobs:
Which brings us to this weeks blog. What is WeaveSync? And, more importantly, why do we need your help beta testing WeaveSync?
WeaveSync is the heart of TextFlow. It is our patent-pending approach to comparing multiple versions of text, and much of WeaveSync is a direct beneficiary of the many, many years of research being done in the fields of bioinformatics and DNA analysis. Early on, when designing TextFlow, we realised that there isn’t such a big difference between text and DNA strings as one might first think - 
and careful adaptation of several bioinformatic algorithms got us quickly up and running with our first version of WeaveSync that could compare two documents and show differences, such as transposition, intelligently.
WeaveSync is constantly evolving and being improved as we discover types of text modifications that it doesn’t handle well. We have always been careful to design it so that even the worst case scenario for any change is still usable, such as the above example where it presents my changes as a single rewrite of a paragraph - even in this situation I can still make use of TextFlow. However, in situations like this we humans can easily see how TextFlow could have given a more detailed presentation of the changes I actually made - that it can more accurately reflect the real-world situation.
This is why we need help from our beta testers not only to find bugs in TextFlow itself, but to also help us improve WeaveSync. If you think that TextFlow could have done a better job when analysing a particular part of your text, please report this just as you would any other bug, along with a comment about how you think TextFlow could have presented the change.
