Octopus: the prototype approaches the next user-testing phase

The prototype that the team from Imperial College built has been taken to the next stage by the lovely software engineering team at company WinGravity.

Wingravity have added the ability for people to rate publications and increased the functionality of the upload mechanism so that publications can now be uploaded as .docx documents. The text, images and tables are then all converted to html, so that the authors can tweak the formatting if required before publishing. This makes Octopus already a much more flexible and user-friendly publication platform than most commercial journals. No need for tedious and expensive proof-reading or reformatting.

Now technical architect Vot is tidying up the API before we can do the final polishing before releasing this prototype to another round of user-testing. We hope to do this before Christmas, keeping us on schedule for a proper Octopus launch next year. This autumn I am continuing to present Octopus at various events across the UK.

This prototype development brings us to the end of the mini science grant from Mozilla, which has been a fantastic boost for Octopus, taking us to the first stage of development.

As ever, if you’d like to give any feedback, or have a sneak prevew of the prototype, do email me. We’d love to have as much user-input as possible. [email protected]