Excitement

(In case you haven’t noticed, it seems to be a very work oriented evening this evening.) I’m often a little envious of people who get to work in cool places developing brand new technology and speaking at conferences (and more importantly having more than a handful of people actually care about that area of development). I’ve been in the same job for about 3 years now and while we are and always have been on the very cutting edge of content related technologies (see, not even a cool name for it…), it’s a little bit old hat to me. I’ve beaten my head against all kinds of standards, HTTP, HTML, CSS, XML, Namespaces, XPath, XSD, XSLT, Word – if there’s content written in it, I’ve probably had to deal with it at some point and if it’s at all web related I’ve probably had a lot to do with it. Now I don’t mean to say that I know everything and I certainly don’t want to imply that I’m any more knowledgeable than anyone else – quite the opposite, I still have a lot to learn and there are a lot of people that I’m constantly learning from. What I am trying to say however, is that as a product becomes more mature, the coolness factor of it’s development tends to wear off. 5 years ago, the ability to replace a standard text area on a HTML page with a WYSIWYG HTML editor was nothing short of astounding. These days most browsers have (very) primitive WYSIWYG editing modes built in. In the past week or two however, I’ve gotten my teeth sunk into some awesome new features that once again have me really excited about the technology space I’m in. With the features I’ve put in during the last week or two and a couple of the features that will go in this week and next, our boring little editor is rocketing forward in usability. When Ephox started making it’s editors the general practice was to look at Word, FrontPage and DreamWeaver to see what they did and how they did it then try to find a way to make that possible within the confines of a browser. Now I’m looking at how those programs handle things and finding them lacking and quite buggy. I used to think their behavior was how it was supposed to work and that working out what the user meant was just difficult – I’m really excited to have discovered that’s not the case: most programs are just really buggy and make it look hard. Now I’m not about to suggest that our product is completely bug free, it’s not – it has a lot of room for improvement (and I’m excited that we’re really focussing on making those improvements happen), but when you look back over the past few years and see the journey that Ephox has taken to get here and follow the progress of the entire content management industry, it’s really quite exciting that we’ve gotten here. So keep an eye out for our 4.0 release (or whatever the heck marketing decide to call it) when it comes out (waiting on management and marketing to decide what the best time for a release would be and what features we want in it). It won’t be announced on Slashdot and seeing as we don’t really sell to end users and most people don’t read the kind of news sites we do get mentioned on, you’ll probably never notice the release, but I’m telling you – it’ll be awesome. I’m excited.