Symphonious

Every so often something comes along that completely changes the way I use a computer. My new MacBook Pro has provided one of those: two finger scrolling. The concept is just so simple; to move the mouse you slide one finger across the track pad, to scroll you slide two fingers across the track pad. You can scroll vertically or horizontally so it beats a scroll wheel mouse hands down.

It's particularly interesting that I've taken to using it so heavily, so quickly, because I've never taken to tapping the track pad to click. I've always found it easier to just keep my thumb hovering over the great big single mouse button that Macs have so it wasn't worth the annoyance of accidental clicks that come with enabling the tap to click function. I've always really liked the fact that Mac laptops only have one button because it makes clicking so much easier - the split button on Windows laptops has always annoyed me and made clicking (both left and right) much slower.

For those that want two buttons though, the new Mac trackpads do have another cool track. Place two fingers on the trackpad and click the button and it treats it as a right click. If  you like the tap to click function, you can just tap with two fingers to get a right click. I think it's a pretty awesome example of designers knowing better than users and sticking to their guns. For years people have asked for a second mouse button on Apple laptops but the Mac designers wanted the simplicity (and efficiency, since most clicks are actually left clicks and a single big button is much faster for that) of having just a single mouse button. It turns out that you don't really want a real second mouse button, you just want an easily accessible, one handed modifier for your mouse click. The two finger click turns out to provide just that without making single clicking harder.

Course, people will still complain - just watch the comments…

So for the record, if you have a textarea in Safari that is set to display: none; You can't set it's content via JavaScript unless you show it first. So:

edCanvas.style.display = "inline";
edCanvas.innerText = body;
edCanvas.style.display = "none";

Really annoying. For those Ephox people using the latest version of our EditLive! WordPress plugin in Safari, that's where your content went. Pull an update from subversion soon and the issue should be fixed.

Correction. That should be edCanvas.innerText = body not edCanvase.value = body. If you set the value it still has problems. Also Andy reports in comments that a timeout might be needed - I have a shiny new MacBook Pro so mines fast enough to not need it. :)

I've been in our San Mateo office the past week working with the sales and marketing folk which has been great, but also challenging and often frustrating. The challenge is in getting a grip on my new job as product manager, the frustrating from the initial objections we often get from clients as they try and guess what the reaction will be from their users instead of actually finding out. It's fair enough, that's all they have to go on but it's frustrating to have to try and share the experiences that we've seen with users giving our software rave reviews. It's also frustrating to hear negative things about software you've written - I always get so attached.

So I was very pleased to see a nice implication made by Steve Loughran about our editor today:

It makes a valid point. If you don't want rich media, if all you want is text and forms, then, assuming you don't want good text editing, web pages and AJAX is sufficient.

The link points to our Java-based editor landing page. Thanks for that Steve - now could I just get you in on a few sales calls?

While most of the Ephox folk use EditLive! to edit their blog entries, there are some poor saps who are using a blog hosting service and can't (we've got some interns working on a standalone blog editor with EditLive!, but that'll take a while yet). This morning Antony learnt the value of a great editor the hard way when he copied and pasted from Microsoft Word into Typepad's default editor:

Now I understand why so many of our users think our Microsoft Word filtering is so good…

I've spent the day doing some work with our Alfresco integration to make it easier to install and a bit more maintainable. Fortunately the Alfresco team were kind enough to point me at their Module Management Tool which while being a bit rough around the edges is really quite cool. Basically, it takes the alfresco.war and a zip file containing the module you want to install and shoves the module into the war file, ready to be deployed. What's particularly cool is that it actually has version management so it knows if it's previously installed a module or if the installed module is more recent than the one you're installing etc.

There is one trap for the uninitiated though, if you get a NullPointerException when you run it (at line 241), make sure your module's zip file has the extension .amp. Took me quite a while to sort that out and Tomcat's caching drove me nuts, but otherwise I'm pretty happy with how easy it was.