The Joy of Flex

We’re extremely excited to release preview 5 of Buzzword today. There’s a lot to love in the new version, but the most important thing is that we’re now letting the public sign up, so if you haven’t gotten your preview account yet, come on by! New features include “as-you-type” spell checking of your documents, full support for the Safari 3.0 beta under Mac OS X, and preliminary support for Firefox under Linux.

Highlights of the new release:

Spell check is the most prominent new feature in this release. We hooked up Grant Skinner’s excellent Spelling Plus Library (SPL) to our editor to provide dictionary lookup and suggestions. SPL is implemented entirely in ActionScript 3 and is very small and fast, plus it provides the ability to download and decompress the dictionary in the background while the application is starting up, so the user doesn’t have to wait while the dictionary is loading. In addition to SPL’s high level interface for easily including spell checking into Flex and Flash components, there’s a low-level API for doing word lookup and suggestions (which is what we are using). It’s great to have a spell checking solution implemented entirely on the client side, so that, down the road, it’ll work just as well when we support disconnected use.

Public signups. Up until this release, if you wanted a Buzzword preview account, you had to write us an email with a story about why you were interested in trying us out. At first I was very dubious that we’d get good stories this way, but boy was I wrong. When we were at the “private beta” stage of the game and we could only let in a few people, this was a great way to hear about what our customers wanted and why they wanted it. We’re sad to leave it behind, but we’re really happy to start letting in the public! We are permitting a limited number of users to sign up every day, and letting the overflow sign up to be invited in as soon as possible.

New browsers. This release adds full support for Safari 3.0 (beta) under Mac OS X, and limited support for Firefox under Linux. At this point maybe you’re wondering, why doesn’t Buzzword automatically support all the browsers that Flash runs in? The answer is that, in order to make Buzzword look and feel just like a desktop word processor, there are some important capabilities that we must have, but that Flash doesn’t natively provide. The two most important ones are full access to all keyboard events, and the ability to get rich text onto and off of the system clipboard. To get past these limitations in Flash, we include some JavaScript that lives in the hosting browser’s DOM, and this JavaScript is implemented differently in every browser. (Even in the same browser running on different platforms: for example, our JavaScript for Firefox/Windows is very different from our JavaScript for Firefox/Mac.) So we have to plan our browser support very carefully.

Better focus and control-key handling. While we’re on the subject of being hosted by the browser, one of the major efforts we made in this release is one you’re most likely to notice only if you’re a heavy keyboard user: focus management got much better. Long-time readers of this blog may remember a post back in February calling for help with focus and control-key management. Well, we didn’t find any help, but we ended up doing much of the work described in that post in order to fix some of the quirks users were seeing when shifting focus around the application and using control keys.

Copying and pasting images across Buzzword documents. Full support of rich formats on the clipboard is one of the most important features of a word processor, and one that is taken for granted with desktop applications. As I described above, it’s especially challenging to do right within the constraints of the browser and the Flash Player. So with each release, we make forward progress toward desktop-level clipboard support. In this release, we’ve added the ability to copy and paste images from one document to another within the same session.

Better session management. Up until this release, every time you opened a new Buzzword window, you had to sign in again. With this release, we’re sharing user credentials across windows, so when you open a document in a new window, it uses the session credentials of the previous window to sign you in automatically, and bypasses the sign-in dialog.

When I look over the list of improvements we’ve made in this release, one thing I notice is that most of them are in the “making it work better” category. We’re nearly done implementing the most important features of a version 1.0 word processor — spell checking was one of the last big ones — and we’ve moved on to getting everything up to release quality. Wahoo!

Check out preview 5

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