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.