Since the very early days of my blogging, I’ve integrated a copy of EditLive! to make the editing pleasant and more powerful. For many, many years there was simply no way I could bring myself to use anything else. Lately though, Apple have been making Java applets less and less appealing while browsers have been continuously improving their content editable suport and JavaScript editors have gotten better at working around the remaining quirks and smoothing off the rough edges on the editing experience.  The final straw for me though was that the current early access release of EditLive! 8.0, which appears to include a lot of fixes for the latest OS X, breaks backwards compatibility with a number of APIs I use to integrate it into this blog.

So the time has finally come to switch to TinyMCE. I still have a custom plugin to fix some of the incredibly poor configuration choices made by default in WordPress (P tags are important remember!) but it’s significantly less custom code and complexity. There are also a bunch of new features that have built into WordPress which I’d never enabled in my EditLive! integration which are nice to have.  The biggest win however is that I can now write blog posts on my iPad, so hopefully I can share a few more links and quick thoughts without having to drag out my laptop.

It is sad to retire EditLive! though. I worked to build it almost from scratch for nearly 10 years and for most if not all of that time it was the absolute cream of the crop for in browser editing with features and usability that were simply unmatched. I have some slight consolation that I’ve also been able to spend some time contributing to TinyMCE and I know the guys behind it are top notch so I’m happy to pass the baton of favourite editor over. I will miss the integrated image editor and its rounded corners and drop shadows…