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2.0 RC1 Preview Available Now!

After over a year of developing a new rtePad from scratch we are proud to announce the availability of rtePad 2.0 RC1 (to existing rtePad customers only).

The changes are quite extensive from our previous offerings, there is nothing in common with rtePad 1.x and rtePad 2.0 except the fact they are both called rtePad ;-)

Before you download the preview of this amazing new product which will be available soon, I would like to talk about some of the most important new additions in rtePad 2.0 RC1.

Overhauled XHTML Engine - The first thing of note, and perhaps one of the biggest changes to rtePad is that we have rebuilt the default browser functions for doing many common HTML formatting options. This is still being further developed and enhanced for the launch of rtePad 2.0 so your mileage may vary with this depending on the sort of html strings you may pass to rtePad.

File Uploading - Another feature which has long been requested for is file uploading capabilities. Right now this functionality is only available for people using PHP but we plan to also have offerings available for all of our supported languages, this will take time, so please bare with us. As for the functionality itself, it is tightly integrated into the editor and is available from within several dialogs. This is still a little bit buggy, but works well enough to be included.

Inline Dialogs - Yet another feature which we have been looking to add into rtePad since its inception is inline dialogs. All dialogs in rtePad are now "in" rtePad and are no longer in the form of popup windows that can get blocked by popup blockers.

Advanced Table Editing - rtePad now has a full suite of table editing options, you can finally split and merge table cells as well as edit the advanced properties of table rows and table cells, along with the table itself, very cool!

Stylesheet Picker - This feature is currently not quite complete as we have an additional little something we want to add before rtePad 2.0 goes live, but you can see the majority of this new feature in the form of a select dropdown picker in most of the dialog popups where you can now assign css classes to items on a page without having to go into page view. This is all done dynamically, so all you have to do is include a specially structured css stylesheet into the editor, and rtePad will do the rest for you.

Fullscreen mode - rtePad can now be maximized to the full screen size of the browser, enabling a larger viewing area for content inside rtePad and making it much more useful as an online word processor.

and much much more... seriously!

Now its time to talk about some of the features missing

We are still ironing out a few kinks in the system overall, and as a result, some of these things we are working on were not complete enough to include in this release. The good news is that there isn't much and that this release is "mostly" complete from a features point of view.

  • No auto saving of content (Like what Gmail does). This was included in rtePad 1.x and will be included in rtePad 2.0.
  • No ability to limit content by the number of words or characters. Once again this was part of rtePad in the past and will continue to be in the future.
  • No right click context menu - This feature may or may not be in rtePad 2.0.
  • No Microsoft Internet Explorer or Opera Support.
  • No find and replace support.
  • Incomplete Javascript API - The API will change significantly by the time rtePad 2.0 is live, basic integration will be the same, but everything else will be different.
  • No tooltips for buttons.
  • Incomplete XHTML/Formatting engine - We have gone to great effort to build a brand new XHTML engine, as a result we are still in the process of making the engine as intelligent as possible for the purposes of dealing with pasted content and preloaded content.
  • Incomplete Text Formatting Functions - We are still ironing out a few kinks with our functions that we use for inserting and modifying notes in the editor, so it is possible that you might perform an action and get unexpected results.
There are also a number of other lower profile features which will either be added into rtePad 2.0 or rtePad 2.1 depending on how much progress we make in the coming weeks.

Many of you may still be asking the question when is rtePad 2.0 actually coming out? The answer: Between 1 and 2 months, however we suspect it will be at the lower end of the spectrum, this all depends on a couple of hurdles we need to overcome, the biggest of which is full Internet Explorer Support which as you all know is never easy, especially in a project of this scale!

To download this release candidate simply log in using your username or customer id and password and navigate to the downloads page.

Click here if you are having troubles logging in.

We look forward to your feedback.


Posted on: Sunday, March 14, 2010 by Steve