Introducing Intersoft WebTextEditor – Part 1

Surely, there are already many text editor components in the market. However, most of these components share a common problem: Bloated user-interface and sluggish performance. That’s just one of many reasons why we decided to develop our very own editor component.

We designed WebTextEditor with a very sophisticated user experience where you can perform spell-checking right within the editor; right click on misspelled words and a select a correct word, as well as uploading multiple files in the background while allowing you to continue editing. These experiences are what set WebTextEditor apart from other editors in the industry which merely provide basic editing capabilities.

Great user experience doesn’t come the easy way. We spent many months researching on usability – that is how people interact and work with writing tasks, how to improve and enhance the editing experience so that their tasks can be done quicker and easier.

The end result is obvious: a web-based text editor that ultimately combines powerful editing features and state-of-the-art user experiences – something that has never been invented before.

In this first post, I’m going to discuss on the unique editing experience and essential user interface aspects of WebTextEditor.

Unique Editing Experience with Integrated Spell Checker and File Uploader

Finally, a web-based text editor that perfectly combines innovative features, elegant interface and great UX in a single interface! Intersoft WebTextEditor rediscovered the art of editing, and makes content authoring easier, simpler and more intuitive.

WebTextEditor lets you write more intuitively by providing you with these innovative features:

• Reliable formatting, high-performance editor.
• Spell check right within the editor, see errors in red-waved lines and right click to choose a suggestion.
• One-click automatic hints suggestion in the status bar.
• Integrated File Uploader, lets you upload multiple files right within the editor.
• Sophisticated asynchronous uploading technology, lets you continue editing while uploading is in progress.
• And more.

We designed WebTextEditor with a very sophisticated user experience where you can perform spell-checking right within the editor; right click on misspelled words and a select a correct word, as well as uploading multiple files in the background while allowing you to continue editing. These experiences are what set WebTextEditor apart from other editors in the industry which merely provide basic editing capabilities.

To give you a better picture on what I’m talking about, please see the following image.

As shown in the above image, WebTextEditor features a nice, general-purpose status bar. During uploading, the status bar will become a progress bar – making efficient use of screen real estate. We’ve also make the bar to show the uploading progress in real-time, and estimates the completion time.

Sleek Design and Elegant User Interface

Next, I’m going to write about some of the unique designs that make WebTextEditor truly different, and more importantly, provides a better way for users to work with content and objects.

Most text editor components in the market still used old-fashioned dialog box interface for user input, such as input for images, hyperlink, tables, etc – which is less intuitive because of the “blocking” nature of the dialog box interface. WebTextEditor advances editing experience with a better, more intuitive approach. Called “block-less” user interface concept, WebTextEditor sports modern, lightweight callout and task pane for user interactions, which ultimately provides user with more intuitive way to work and interact with input fields and objects.

As you can see in the following screenshot, the WebTextEditor user interface is designed in minimalist style and very lightweight.

Furthermore, WebTextEditor is built to support both HTML and XHTML document type and has been tested to run flawlessly in the top 5 browsers available in market, including IE8, Google Chrome and the new Safari 4.

The toolbar, combo, color picker, table and symbol pop up are client-side components designed specifically for WebTextEditor, providing high-performance and responsive user interface while significantly minimizing server-side page output at the same time.

Certainly, you’ll need to experience it yourself to really feel these unique, rich editing experiences. You can watch a video that demonstrates WebTextEditor experience here, or download the beta version and try it in your own development machine.

In my next post, I’m going to cover more interesting topics on WebTextEditor UX – such as the built-in media gallery, task pane concept, smart toolbar that won’t clutter up your page, intuitive Word 2007 style floating toolbar and much more.

Got questions, comments, feedback? Please feel free to leave your comment in this post.