Conceptual Clarity

Don't you just love analogies?  Well I hope you do because if you're about to be on the receiving end of one.  I was watching an episode of the British car show Top Gear yesterday with a segment featuring Richard Hammond attempting to drive a Formula 1 car.  Now if you're like me, or Richard Hammond as it turns out, you'd be sitting there thinking, "driving a car, even if it is a Formula 1 car, how hard can it be?"  It turns out that, the answer is "very!"

This particular situation struck me as having parallels with our development of EditLive! and web based rich text editors in general.  At the highest level EditLive! is basically a word processor for the web.  It's got most of the features that you might find in Microsoft Word or Open Office with some tweaks to make them more applicable to web documents e.g. generating standards compliant HTML for starters.

At the outset this doesn't sound difficult, after all we've had many of these features in Microsoft Word, Open Office or even the browser (when it comes to rendering) for years.  Yet that apparent ease doesn't parallel with Ephox's experience in development.  We have been, and still are, developing EditLive! in its present form for 6 years now, since I started at Ephox in fact.  However, that's nothing compared with MS Office that's been around for over 20 years!  The features that we all take for granted in Microsoft Office are (mostly) well designed and the result of the significant levels of investment that you'd expect from Microsoft.  It's when you take a much closer look at the web standards and user behaviour that you start to realize how complex the task of creating a word processor is (cue the Formula 1 analogy).

As the product manager for EditLive! I've experienced this effect for several years now when defining the specifications for EditLive!.  Whether it's a specification for track changes, how specific keys work in various situations (e.g. "Enter" or "Tab") or even down to the level of how text renders on the screen each area has a surprising amount of detail to consider and nuances to implement.  For instance, in HTML try checking out the difference between PTs, PXs and EMs for fonts and did you know that PXs can be considered a relative measurement?

At Ephox we've put a lot of investment into these little things in the past because we believe the little things are important for authors.  The fact that the tab key indents a list in some cases and in others navigates a table or adds a table row - important.  The use of the Enter key to insert a paragraph in some cases, a <br> in others and in others still a list item - important.  The ability to resize every aspect of a table inline instead of via a dialog - important.  I could go on as there are many, many more of these small items that are important to all the web content creators out there.  However, the most important thing I think you could expect from a rich text editor is that it, and the team behind it, realize the importance of all these little items.

Creating a word processor is much more difficult than it seems just like driving a Formula 1 car and the most important thing in both cases is attention to detail.  In the coming months you'll see that attention to detail coming through yet again in our latest release of EditLive!.  We've been paying attention to rendering, to font sizes, to keyboard behaviour and many other areas.  I'm confident it will be another fantastic release and if you'd like a sneak peek, just head over to LiveWorks!'s Early Access Release and check the latest in EditLive! 6.4 out for yourself.  Improvements to date have focused on CSS rendering for floats and getting sizing correct for different units and there's more to come.

It's a question that I'm often asked and I'm not sure that I've ever been able to give a really good answer.  The short answer is to say that the product manager is the person who is responsible for making a product marketable.  That doesn't just mean that a PM should fill a product full of flashy features the marketing department can leverage.  It means that the PM is the person responsible for making sure that the product being created can be sold to the market.  The need to work with the engineering team, the sales team, the marketing team, the CEO and just about everyone else in the company.  More importantly they need to be able to work with that most important group outside of the company - the clients.  It's their job to be in the clients' heads and to be the clients' advocate within an organization.

Actually, on second thoughts that definition doesn't sound half bad.  The step that I'm more likely to stumble on is the next question, which is almost invariably, "so what does the product manager actually do?"  For that answer I'm usually somewhat more glib and say something like "anything and everything" or "whatever's required".  However, with some new PMs coming on board at Ephox I feel compelled to work on developing a better definition.

I've been browsing around a bit today and so far I've come up with the excellent article on Ken Norton's blog entitled How to Hire a Product Manager (not that I'm encouraging anyone to start looking for my replacement).  Ken has done a nice job of summing up some of my experiences from product management and I think that this article serves as a good starting point for anyone looking for some insight on the questions about what a product manager actually does.  I can't point to one single thing that is more important than another in Ken's post so I guess my best advice is to get across them all if you're wanting to get into product management.  

In addition to the skills needed to get the job and the skills mentioned in Ken's post, I would like to add some of my own:

• Know your customers - This is an obvious one, but something I always like to remind myself of.  Over the years I've had the opportunity to meet quite a few of Ephox's clients in person and spoken to many hundreds more on the phone.  I'm still amazed at some of the insights that can be gotten when you take the time to sit down and talk with people.  There have been many ideas that ended up on the cutting room floor after a few in depth conversations and others that have been picked off the bottom of a pile of papers and implemented because it's more useful than anyone might think.  Above all things, remember that you are the voice of the customers in the development process.
• Know your customers (Part II) - There are some customers out there who will understand your product almost as well as you do, if not better - know these people.  They are some of the best people to field test new functionality with.  The good news is that these people usually aren't hard to find, they're the ones coming through with all the support requests.  If you don't know who those people are then go over and talk to the people in support because they'll know.
• Be your product's biggest fan - That might sound immodest but if you don't like it then no one else will.  If you don't believe in the things your product can do and the pain points it can address then you might as well give up now.  Yes, your product will have its flaws, they all do and you need to know them, but don't forget about the strengths, you'll need to know those too when it comes to talking with sales and marketing.

Finally, as someone who hopes he never stops learning, I would be interested in hearing from anyone else as to what they think is important for a product manager.  You'll find the comments field below…I'd love for you to use it.

As someone who enjoys life in a democratic country I know the benefits that choice can bring.  However, if you've ever attempted to build a program to control humanity, or if you've watched The Matrix Reloaded you will know that choice can introduce a fundamental flaw in your evil plans.  So at what point does choice go from good to bad?  At what point do all those benefits of choice transform into a bad Keanu Reeves movie and what does any of this have to do with business?  Well read on…

A few nights ago I was trawling through the great ABC (that's Australian Broadcasting Commission) video on demand libraries when I came across a very interesting story on choice from one of the ABC's science programmes, Catalyst.  Now before you go thinking "science schmience" the interesting part of this story is when they start to look at the way choices influence consumer behaviour.

In the story they run a quick experiment to demonstrate the benefits of choice and the perils of too many choices.  I won't go through all the details of the experiment here but in summary it demonstrates that when they presented people with 24 different jams to try and buy they attracted a lot of interest from potential consumers, however there were very few sales.  A similar group of people was then presented with only 6 different jams and while there were overall fewer potential consumers interested there were 10 times the number of sales.  Interesting!

So how does this apply to the software business?  Well in the software business we love choices, we love different versions and we love to produce variations on a theme but is all this choice bad for business?  Time for some self analysis.  About a month ago I was having some Windows problems (that's right, laugh it up Mac users) and I thought I might just go for the Vista upgrade instead of an XP re-install.  The first thing I discover is that Vista has some good benefits for memory management, multimedia and it looks pretty (all good so far).  The very next thing I find out is that there several different versions, Home Basic, Home Premium, Business and Ultimate to name a few, so now I have to find out which one to buy.  Well I tried, I checked out the very informative Vista SuperSite from Paul Thurrott and managed to get myself even more confused as to which version I wanted (the site was clear, my wants were not).  Back in the Windows XP days this was easy Home or Pro, now I just wind up confused; curse you choice!

At the end of all that I decided that I would stick with the devil I know, so I'm still a Windows XP user.  Why?  Well I think it's because I had too many choices - Ephox would have kindly covered the cost of Vista for my company laptop.  It's not only Microsoft that suffers from this, I think many companies have gone down the same road.  I know I certainly experienced the same problems when evaluating some issue tracking systems recently and certainly every time there are separate editions of the same product.  Incidentally, I also have similar issues when shopping for any kind of electronics, whether it's a TV, washing machine or mobile phone.  The end result is that I almost invariably delay my purchase, or just not purchase something at all.

So yes, choice is good, and I am glad I live in a society where I can chose what career I can follow and who my elected officials are.  However, too much choice can drive me nuts.  It can prevent me from purchasing and cause me to over-invest in evaluating the options, further delaying any purchase and increasing the chance that I will just give up and not buy anything.  If you're about to introduce a new purchasing option for your products stop and think "is this going to enable us to enter a new market or just further fragment and confuse our existing one?"  If the answer is the latter, well then chose your path wisely!

As the product manager for EditLive! I spend a lot of time thinking about how we can enable people to be more productive using one of the most familiar software applications - the word processor.  Certainly there are major features that can improve productivity in leaps and bounds - spell checking as you type, or track changes for instance - but, for me, making productivity gains in any piece of software is a game of clicks.

When you think about your user interface design give some thought as to how many clicks it’s taking your users to browse around the interface.  As a user a click is not just a click, it’s a series of actions.  You start by looking for the command you want, you then move the mouse and make a click, you may then have to interpret the new dialog or information presented on screen and then, finally, perform the action you wanted to perform.  The effect of adding clicks is even worse for web applications where each click can mean another HTTP request and, even in the age of AJAX, a screen refresh.  Sure, most of the time this is a process performed in less than 10 seconds or so, maybe a minute for a very slow web application - but those 10 second blocks add up and they add up fast and they add up to dollars.

For example, lets take a team of 50 knowledge workers getting paid about $30 an hour each.  As part of their daily tasks they have to add information to a wiki, to a blog and perhaps to a content management system.  To do this our hypothetical knowledge workers will be using my favourite web word processing interface; EditLive!.  Conservatively I’m going to assume that we can save each one of these people 10 minutes a day (that’s only about 60 clicks a day).  Over the course of the year this means a saving of $62,500 just through a few less clicks.

When playing the game of click minimization though you need to be careful not to confuse it with feature minimization.  Fewer clicks does not mean fewer features, it simply means making the commonly used features easier to find and use.  A great example of this is the Apple iPod.  With my iPod I can do anything from browse a photo library through to playing a song, but the most commonly used functionality is simply a button press away in the form of the play button.

When looking at EditLive!’s interface there are several of things that we do for click minimization.  For starters there is the context menu, making it easy to access the most relevant commands for a particular cursor location within two clicks (a right and then a left).  Then there’s the keyboard UI, for example, the tab key can be used to add four spaces, indent a list, outdent a list or add a table row all depending on where the cursor location is.  Finally there are the EditLive! dialogs that will not be blocked by popup blockers (saving all those clicks to allow popups) and they’re already cached by EditLive! ensuring you never have to wait for the web server to send you the dialog.

All these elements quickly add up and you can see that it doesn’t take long to reach savings of over $60,000 a year.  So, if you’re designing a user interface today or evaluating a productivity tool put some thought into how many clicks your users will have to go through because it will save you time and money.

My name is Damien Fitzpatrick and I'm a Microsoft Word 2007 user.

There, I said it, I use Word 2007.  In fact I've been using it since its release and being somewhat experienced in the whole WYSIWYG editor space I thought that I would share a few of my favourite features and a few of those that I could live without.  I use Word day in and day out.  It's something that I use for work and something that I use even more for my university assignments so I'm pretty familiar with the product - or at least I think I am.  That said, I've never been one to heavily customize the interface and I've certainly never written a Word macro.

Before I get underway though, credit where credit's due, congratulations to the Microsoft Office development team.  It's been a long time between Office releases and they've really made some progress in this release as well as trying to freshen up one of the most enduring product families in software.  They've made some bold moves with this release (say hello to the ribbon bar) and I think some of them have paid off while the jury is out on some others.

What I Like

Let's start out on a positive note.  As part of working through my MBA I often have to produce professional looking reports as part of a case study or some other exercise.  Unfortunately my documents just don't look fancy or that professional - they just look like another Word document.  At least that was the situation until Word 2007 got installed on my PC.  The Word team is to be congratulated on their ability to format plain text and make it look great.  I particularly like the new functionality around the styles for a document.  I can now easily choose a set of styles to make my document look distinctive, modern, fancy or formal (just some of the style sets available).  I also like the changes to the header and footer functionality and the ease with which I can create a great looking cover page from a template kindly provided by Word.  

The jewel in the crown of the styles functionality for me has to be the textbox functionality.  Wow, textboxes look great and they're just text.  I know I could have done some of this in Word 2003, but the textboxes in 2007 and so much better.  I can now quickly and easily create textboxes to highlight phrases and to make page borders in a great variety of new ways.  It shows that just because something is in plain text doesn't mean it has to be boring.

As a student submitting referenced assignments I'm also a big fan of the new functionality for citations and bibliographies.  They make it much easier for me to put referencing in my document which is great since creating reference lists has to be one of the most painful tasks I go through as part of writing an assignment.

What I Don't Like

By now you've probably noticed that I am yet to write anything about the new ribbon toolbar - well as you might have guessed, it's because I don't like it.  It's because I can't FIND anything (don't get me started on how long it took me to find the zoom scroll bar).  Granted, there's going to be time taken in learning any new user interface and it did take me time to find things on the old menus, but over the years the menus and I had come to a grudging respect, well mostly I learnt to respect them and not the other way around.  Maybe I will get used to the new ribbon over time, but part of me thinks that that's hardly the point, I thought we were all told it was supposed to be more intuitive?  Yes, the ribbon bar was supposed to be more intuitive, yes it was supposed to be more usable and it is, up to a point.  In case you're interested, for me, that point is up to anything that's on the Home tab, beyond that I'm lost - incidentally the Home tab is made up of all those things that already was on the toolbars of Word.

So you are probably wondering now whether I'm just one of those stubborn users adverse to change even if it's for my own good.  Obviously I'd like to think that I'm not so I did some introspection to try and work out why I can't find anything.  As you might have guessed I've come up with a few points:

• To me the options on the ribbon just aren't ordered well by default.  Yes, I could re-order them and I probably will at some stage, but right now I really wanted to use Word how it's creators intended and given how long it took me to find where to customize the ribbon I'm not sure they intended it to be customized.  To date every time I've used Word 2007 I've had to go searching through the ribbons at least once and it's not because they aren't intuitive it's because my intuition obviously expects a command to be in a different place to the Microsoft UI designer's intuition.  For instance, why isn't the Headers and Footer functionality on the Page Layout tab where I expected it to be and where did my spell check and print buttons go?
• Secondly, I have an issue with modes.  As a Mac user and someone familiar with the works of Jef Raskin, Adrian, has always warned me of the dangers of modes within user interfaces.  Of course I had always laughed this off as someone who can operate a VCR's recording schedule mode is entitled to do.  However, it's come back to bite me.  Adrian you were right, modes are bad.  I've found a great article explaining my conundrum, and yes, it's from Adrian.  He was well ahead of me on this issue, his article on Modes and the Office 12 [2007] UI is spot on.  I'm wondering how many other people are having this problem?  The most significant problem I have with modes is that I seamlessly switch between them (at least in my head).  I might be reviewing a document one moment and then wanting to add a table or paragraph to it the next and now that means all those other functions are yet another click away from me because I have to switch tabs.

The Verdict

There's a whole lot more to Word 2007 including a new file format, integration with Sharepoint and that's just for starters.  However, the things I've mentioned briefly above are the features that matter to me when I'm using Word.  I'd have to say that for me Microsoft Word 2007 is mostly a winner.  I'm prepared to learn the new ribbon user interface for the benefits that I get from the new styles functionality.  However, I think it's going to be tough for many rolling out this huge user interface change across an entire business.  The user interface is the foundation upon which business productivity is built and since Microsoft Office is all about delivering productivity gains let's hope that I'm wrong and that the ribbon is going to make us all more productive.

UPDATE: Sample Document

Jason asked me for a sample document, so here's one.  Sorry I didn't have anything more exciting than this, but this document uses a cover page automatically generated by Word 2007 and themed headers, footers and headings to match.

It wasn't just the Lotus aficionados who were excited about Lotusphere this week Orlando, we had a team there as well in support of our EditLive! for IBM Workplace Web Content Management (IWWCM) integration.  Things got even more exciting for us when Mike Rhodin announced that the integration had taken out the Best in Lotusphere Showcase award (at the time of writing the Lotusphere page is yet to be updated with this news).

This is great news for the Ephox team and certainly made my day when I heard it on Tuesday (Australian time).  However, I think it's even better news for all those people out there creating content on the web, whether they are using EditLive! or a competing offering.  To me it signals realization of the importance of rich word processing applications for the web and how these applications can make the task of getting content online so much easier.

Creating compelling web content is complicated, much more so than using Microsoft Word to create a document.  The web's componentized architecture really makes it difficult for your average contributor to write content.  The web adds a whole lot more complexity - as a user I have to work with my style sheet, I need to collaborate with others, I need to upload the images I want or find them on another server…and this is just the beginning!  If I have to do this through an unfamiliar interface, if I can't run a spell checker, if I don't have a thesaurus or if I can't create a list properly then something that's already hard for me just became really difficult.  Sure blogs, wikis and content management systems make it easier today than ever before, but you still might have to explain to someone why their images are on Flickr, why ==Heading== (MediaWiki markup) is a heading, or why they can only see versions in web pages but not as tracked changes.

This is exactly where I believe WYSIWYG editors like EditLive! come to the fore and our EditLive! for IWWCM integration is one of the best examples of this.  EditLive! for IWWCM is the best of "integration at the glass".  There's a lot that has gone into the integration, though from the user's perspective using it is as simple as using Microsoft Word or Open Office.  From the instant that the user opens an item for editing, EditLive! is customizing their experience to be personalized and, most of all, pain free.  To begin, EditLive!'s interface is customized according to their role within the system and EditLive! fetches the appropriate style sheet from the server and presents it to the user in a drop down with built in styles preview.  If the user needs to insert a link or an image they simply press a button on EditLive!'s interface and can immediately browse the content repository for all available content and images they have permissions to use.  In addition to this there is EditLive!'s spell checking support, that is automatically set to the appropriate language for the user, as well as a thesaurus, comprehensive table and list support and all of EditLive!'s other rich editing support.  Finally there is track changes, working just as it does in Microsoft Word with the addition that EditLive! has already been supplied with the user's name and is logging all their changes so they can easily collaborate with their colleagues and work with the changes in the editor.

As we move into 2007 I hope that all this is a sign of things to come.  This year we want to take EditLive! to places it hasn't been to before.  Not only in new content management systems but in blogs, in wikis and in all sorts of other web content systems and in each place we take EditLive! we're going to aim to create rich, integrated user experiences.

In December we started a new initiative at Ephox called LiveWorks!.  It's something that I'm very excited about because I think it has the potential to offer a tremendous amount of value to Ephox and, more importantly, to you!

As I mentioned in an earlier post Ephox follows an Extreme Programming (XP) methodology for our development which delivers us a great amount of value internally.  Some of the benefits we get include:

• Test driven development has greatly improved product quality and code coverage
• Iterations ensure that we can deliver the most valuable features first
• We are becoming increasingly flexible with respect to changes in the market and how they reflect on the product roadmap.
• We can now release software at any time, at least internally.  

The last couple of points have been of great value internally, but there's more to releasing a software product than just developing the software.  When releasing some of the major things that need to be addressed are sales, marketing and support of a product.  Obviously these are critical aspects of releasing any product, but they do increase the time between code completion and release.  Thus, as clients, to date you may not have seen the results of our internal flexibility for roadmaps and release cycles.

LiveWorks! is about delivering this value to you.  LiveWorks! will give you an insight into what we're working on at the moment and provide useful code, integrations and plugins we've developed previously that we can release more easily on LiveWorks!.  All the integrations and plugins available on LiveWorks! come with source code and are free for you to download and use.

LiveWorks! is about hearing from you.  We've provided a community mailing list as part of LiveWorks! that myself and many of the Ephox developers are on.  If you see a project on LiveWorks! that interests you or you'd like to suggest  an integration please let the LiveWorks! community know.  If you'd like to share an integration or some code that you've found useful we'd also love to hear from you.

LiveWorks! is still evolving.  Over time we will be adding more value to LiveWorks!.  In the near future we hope to be releasing more prototype integrations and plugins.  We're also hoping to provide you with a better view of what we're planning by providing development road maps, early access releases and weekly builds so you can monitor the progress of our products and be ready to take advantage of new features.

Over the last twelve months Ephox has been working with the Extreme Programming (XP) methodology.  It's something that we are pretty committed to because at the end of the day XP's focus is on delivering more value to the client more quickly.  Hopefully that's a win win situation.  We deliver software more quickly to you and you can then give us feedback that enables us to create even better software.  

It's been a challenging shift, possibly most of all for me.  We're shifting from a fairly traditional, design up front type methodology, it was under this methodology that we begun the development of EditLive! 6.0 and the EditLive! Productivity Pack.  It wasn't without its advantages, it did enable me to more clearly communicate with clients about what was coming, but where it fell down was getting the timing right.  We blew past our initial estimates and the release was significantly late.

If we'd been following the extreme programming methodology at the time we would probably still have delivered the "finished" product at around the same time.  The key difference would have been that we would have been able to deliver more interim releases.  We would have been able to let you all see what we'd been working on and, most importantly, we would have been able to incorporate more of your feedback.  We will shortly be kicking off a new initiative called LiveWorks! to help address that, but more on that in another post.

The agility of XP doesn't come without a cost though.  If we're going to be delivering value more frequently and taking your feedback into consideration it means our roadmaps are going to get a little "fuzzier".  By leaving the roadmap somewhat "fuzzy" we can maintain the vision and direction of a release while still taking your feedback into account as we progress.  It also allows us to change direction more rapidly if that's what's valuable for you.  For instance, if accessibility suddenly becomes the "hot topic" (as it is in Europe at the moment), we can shift our release plans from track changes improvements (for example) to deliver the accessibility functionality you needed yesterday.  Well maybe we can't shift quite that fast, but you get the idea.

Sounds great right?  Well it does on paper, in practice, many of us (myself included) still love to look at larger scale plans.  I would love to have the roadmap planned out perfectly, to the finest detail, for the next two years, yet this is something XP recommends against, and with good reason, afterall all, best laid plans are often laid to waste, especially in a field that moves as swiftly as software development.  It's been a difficult move to stop myself from spending time planning all the fine little details (which inevitably shift anyway) but I've managed to restrain myself.  What I am going to focus on instead on communicating with you more clearly and continuously.  This blog is the start of that, and LiveWorks! will be live soon to give you even more of an insight.  2007 is going to be an exciting year, so stick with us, keep your feedback coming and look out for even more valuable improvements to EditLive!.

OK so the pun was bad, but I couldn't help myself.  All puns and jokes aside though, the Nintendo Wii is doing serious business.  This Christmas one of the hottest selling products is the Nintendo Wii.  I bought myself one, as did many many others.  I've never before bought a games console on its release date and in fact, with the little time I have to play games, I really prefer using my laptop.  So why my change of heart?  It's down to the Wii's outstanding product design and therein I believe there are a few lessons to be learned by product managers and development teams everywhere.

The Wii is not the most powerful next-generation games console - its graphics don't stack up against the competition, it can't play Blu-Ray discs (or DVDs for that matter) and it doesn't even have a hard-drive.  So why buy one?  Because of the innovative style of control and gameplay.  The controllers of the Wii respond to the player's movements in three dimensions instead of just the wiggle of the thumb or the press of a button.  It's a concept so simple I'm surprised that no-one thought of it before.  As a consumer it's this that I've valued over all the other features of the consoles and having now played the Wii I can tell you it's value well placed.

So as a product manager for software used by businesses what can all this possibly mean to me?  Well there are several product design concepts that the Wii exemplifies that many business can learn from:

• Vision is key.  If in doubt, have a look at the interviews with the Wii development team.  It's also key at Ephox.  We develop using an Extreme Programming (XP) methodology and for this vision is so important.  Check out James Shore's article on Vision in Agile Development if you want to know more.
• Sometimes your customers can't tell you what they want.  I imagine if Nintendo asked any gamer what they wanted in a console their answer would have been better graphics or more games.  I doubt that anyone would have said "a controller that responds to your movements in three dimensional space".  We experienced something similar with Track Changes.  Clients didn't ask for it as it wasn't something they expected of their online WYSIWYG editor, but our vision told us how valuable it is.
• Changing the balance of differentiation.  Nintendo changed the value curve.  They focused on the control mechanism and the gameplay and reduced the investment on other factors, like state-of-the-art graphics, media and hard drive technology.  This enabled them to introduce a clearly differentiated, valued product for less than the cost of the competition.  For Ephox we've had great success with integrating EditLive! into other online systems because the differentiation shifts from management and control to creating a system that people can actually use and obtain value from.
• Simple is often best.  While I am sure the Wii controllers are technically fairly complex, their beauty is in how simple they are to use.  As a very casual game-player I've never quite managed to get the hang of the XBox controller, but with the Wii I could pick it up and start playing straight away.  As any software developer would know, making simple, easy to use interfaces is very difficult, and it's definitely something I'm focused on as a product manager.

Over the last six months I have had many people ask me whether Ephox will be developing a JavaScript-based editor in the future.  This is something that we've considered in the past, but the reality of the situation at the moment is that Java enables us to do more and that means deliver more to you. 

Most of you have probably already seen the likes of FCKEditor and TinyMCE and perhaps even used one of them.  These are probably the two best offerings available based on native browser technologies.  The way that these editors work is by using JavaScript to work with an editor component embedded within the browser.  This works well for most basic editing, for example, bold, italic, underline and simple tables.  However, these tools are ultimately limited by the functionality that the browser can provide.  At the end of the day, browsers aren't built for editing, they're made for rendering.

The other advantage to the JavaScript approach is that there is no JRE install required.  However, over the last few years Sun Microsystems has done a great job with it's Java Everywhere campaign and I can't say that the issue of Java support has caused us any problems in the last year or so.

Java has freed us of the constraints of the browsers and this is why EditLive! can offer important productivity functionality like spell check-as-you-type, thesaurus, accessibility checking and syntax highlighting for source code editing.  Another great example is track changes, here's a feature I don't imagine any browser development team building in, and without Java I don't think we could have built it either.

Finally, there's a whole lot of little things that we've been able to do with EditLive! that often don't get noticed on the initial evaluation, but you're contributors will get annoyed if they're not there.  Andrew likes to refer to this as "the death of 1000 pin pricks".  These are the little things that people have just come to expect over time.  Menus for instance - without menus users will need to mouse over each toolbar icon to see what it does, or dialogs getting blocked by pop-up blockers, or the lack of double-click actions to open properties dialogs or simply the preservation of content when you accidentally hit the back button.  No single one of these is enough to cause contributors to stop using an editor, but together…well it's the death of 1000 pin pricks.

So yes, we use Java, and we will continue to do so, keeping our eye on the browser-based technologies, and re-evaluating them as they (hopefully) offer more functionality.  At the end of the day Java enables us to provide you with the most value so that's where we need to be.  What matters to us is delivering productivity to you and your users every time that they use EditLive! and that's exactly what Java enables us to do better than anything else.