Symphonious

You know, until just now I'd always thought that getting the JRE installed was a 10 minutes process or so. It turns out that this computer didn't have the JRE installed so when I went to write a blog post1, I got the missing plug-in box and the instruction to click to install the required plug-in. So click I did and in under 2 minutes not only is the JRE fully downloaded and installed, but the page has reloaded with EditLive! fully up and running, ready for me to write this post.

Needless to say, I'm impressed. If your applet provides any real value to the end user2, they should have no trouble getting it downloaded and installed then get back to work with minimal interruption. Keep up the good work Sun!

1 - which I'll get back to at some point.↩

2 - ie: it's not just used for gratuitous flashy graphics↩

To Jonathan Schwartz,

The Ephox engineering team saw the really cool work you've done on project blackbox and we've come up with a marketing idea that would help you show just how portable blackboxes really are.

In essence, the idea is to take a blackbox on a travelling road show around to Sun's potential clients to show off what it's capable of. The trouble is, there's no point in just dumping a container outside their door and saying "cool, huh?" - it's got to actually do something cool when you put it there. That's where we come in.

We propose that we take a big semi-trailer, put a blackbox on it along with a power generator in a sister container1 and take the Ephox engineers on a road trip. We'll run OpenSolaris on the servers in the box for all our development needs. Plus whe can develop on SunRays connected through to servers in the box to show off Sun's remove terminal technology. Considering we develop against a huge range of enterprise CMS systems (IBM Workplace, Vignette, Stellent, Percussion and more), we could make good use of all that computing power. It shouldn't be too hard to set up a wireless link to a fitted out Airstream for us to follow along behind and work from.

Heck, throw a Thumper in for storage space, invite Robert Scoble and video blog it. It'd be a travelling Sun technology demonstration. You could even go international - just stash the blackbox in the hull of a cruise ship2 and we'll keep "working" from the pool deck.

I'm sure Ephox would go for it - after all, we get free office space for our developers and since big fortune 500 companies are right in the middle of our market, we'd sell Sun hardware and EditLive! at the same time!

Just drop me an email - we'll do lunch and sort out the details.

1 - running on bio-diesel of course↩

2 - the excess baggage fees might cost a bit…↩

We're coming up to that point in development again where we need to do up a change log for a release. Ephox has never really gotten this process down pat so it inevitably leads to trawling through a back log of subversion commit logs and bugzilla reports. It always feels like there should be a better way to do it, but it's always too easy to forget to add something to the change log if you try to keep it up to date all the time.

Doug suggested today that the XP approach to change logs would be to keep it up to date each iteration. Since each iteration is a release - even if in our case it doesn't always go out to end users - it should be documented as such. The net result would be that when we release we just need to combine the change logs from the iterations since the last release. It's something that could be added in to my Monday morning iteration clean up and kick start. I'm already pulling the completed story cards down off the wall and noting down the weeks velocity. It shouldn't take too much to add change log entries for each of the completed stories as well. Then we just need to be strict about never changing anything without a story card which isn't too far from the situation today.

Is there a better way? How do other people handle change logs?

Whoever thought that supporting free mailing lists by putting ads in each email was ever going to be a good idea? My spam filter consistently picks up emails from Yahoo lists as spam and because the ads keep changing it never seems to learn that their not.

It probably doesn't help that Yahoo also includes a screenful of mailing list information at the end of each and every single post to the list.

Sigh.

After much hard work and gnashing of teeth, the beta of our next major release is finally out, including the new productivity pack and track changes. The internet Gods tried to stop us by cutting off our oxygen, er internet supply but the files finally made it across the pacific to our main servers. You can check it all out in the productivity pack section of Ephox.com. It's a real beta in that we haven't done any real testing on it and so it's likely to have stability problems that we'll iron out before the final release. We're very keen to get feedback on the release, both in terms of any bugs you find and in terms of how to improve the UI, extra APIs to add for integrating it into backend systems etc.

Track changes has been the big, scary feature that I've talked about a lot in previous posts, so it's great to finally get it out to the public. Tracking nearly every operation in an editor the size of EditLive! is a very daunting task and there are so many little details that you don't think of before hand but have to deal with. You have to know how every change in the document interacts with every new change that happens and be able to reject or accept them out of order. While this isn't easy, it provides huge benefits over using a simple diff tool to find out what changed because you can build in intention preservation. In other words, what the user intended to do is reflected rather than just the minimum set of differences. You can also better handle multiple editors for a document rather than assuming that changes were only made by the one person.

Overall this is shaping up to be a huge release that our clients have been clamoring to get their hands on for a while now and I think engineering is going to be really proud of the final release. Certainly, I'm proud enough of the functionality and reliability of the beta - it looks to be more robust than any of our previous releases have been before we've started the final test and bug fix cycle. Check it out and let me know what you think.