We are lucky to have Mark Wubben, in from the Netherlands, interning here at Jot for the summer. His first project is going to be finishing up an internal project with the super secret code name “Jotliner.” We will release his work as a to-do list page type.
More on the project as it develops.
As you might have heard today, we released a new version of our wiki today. As part of the release we added page types, which allow you to include structured data like spreadsheets, file cabinets, calendars, and other application pages in your wiki. This is a pretty big step for us and it really opens up what you can do with a wiki.
I’m also really excited because this is our first release with our new team of interaction and interface designers (led by Mandy Sladden along with CSS gurus Adam Howell, and Joseph Wain). I think you will really notice the difference in the feel of the wiki when you use our latest version.
I’ve never really understood applications that say “we give people control over look and feel – you can change the css.” CSS is a not good way to configure look and feel in any sort of maintainable way. You are almost guaranteed your changes will break from release to release because of the complexity of markup changes required to support an interactive application. Not to mention, who really wants to take the time to figure out somebody else’s complex markup? So CSS customization never really seemed like a good way to go. In this release we took steps to give people more control over the look and feel without needing any understanding of CSS or HTML. Under the hood this is driven by color XML files that define a base set of colors. We do some really cool color generation from these base colors to derive the look and feel (more on this subject later).
With this release out, we will turn out attention to upgrading the 42,000 wikis that have taken up residence in our data center. This is a top priority for us so bear with us while we work through the space.
I tried to focus on the quality of our release notes so it is easier to understand what changed and what was fixed from version to version. I always really appreciated Nick Bradbury’s release notes for Feedemon so I stole his format. Feedback is welcome.
We only play once a week. We swear. We could stop any time we wanted. Really! We are just casual users…