Genii Weblog

Have you personally used CoexEdit? Are you sure?

Thu 10 Apr 2008, 10:03 AM



by Ben Langhinrichs
I got this question today, "How hard is it to use CoexEdit?"  Ironically, I happened to have noticed this person's name on a couple of ideas posted on IdeaJam recently, so my answer was, "What do you think?  I see you've already used it"  Needless to say, he was surprised.  Now, I will grant you that the toolbar used on IdeaJam does not take advantage of many of the available features, but using CoexEdit is as simple as editing.  If you have ever posted an idea on IdeaJam, you have used CoexEdit.  If you have posted a comment or question in the Lotusphere Sessions db this year, you have used CoexEdit.  In fact, there are a number of other companies using CoexEdit on public websites, so you may have used it multiple places.  How would you even know?  You just edit, use the intuitive icons in the toolbar to create tables or links or add graphics, and the content is saved, the content looks like it is supposed to and everything just works.  Or, you edit the way you normally do from a Notes client, and then save, and all that content looks the same on the web and also, just works.  Like most really good software, CoexEdit gets out of the way of your doing what you do best.  It is not that it isn't doing anything, it is that it is doing it well enough that you don't have to think about it.

So, are you still so sure you haven't used CoexEdit? Maybe the better question is, why doesn't your company get CoexEdit and see if your employees and customers won't notice either?

Copyright © 2008 Genii Software Ltd.

What has been said:


694.1. Charles Robinson (04/10/2008 07:16 AM)

The big annoyance I had with CoexEdit as implemented on IdeaJam is that I couldn't just paste in a link and have it clickable. I asked Bruce and he told me I had to use the link button, which I always forget. Also, when I pasted in a link it gave an error made FireFox really unstable.

I'm not knocking CoexEdit, I'm just saying when I did use it, it wasn't quite as intuitive as I would like. I'll admit it could be better now. I haven't tried it in a while. :-)


694.2. Ben Langhinrichs (04/10/2008 07:34 AM)

Charles - That is a bug that the specific version of FCKeditor (the web editor being used with CoexEdit) used by IdeaJam had with Firefox. It worked properly with Internet Explorer, and it works properly in later versions with Firefox. I'll have to check and see if the public site still has that problem, in which case I should get Bruce to upgrade it. Thanks for the feedback, as that is the kind of thing which is easy to miss when you are used to working around it (meaning, I have always used the link icon so I forgot it was a problem there).


694.3. Jan Schulz (10.04.2008 09:13)

It doesn't work with opera :-) Displays nice, but afterwards you get the source displayed (with the br-tag and so on...


694.4. Les Z (04/11/2008 11:08 AM)

Ben:

The link in the blog to CoexEdit is invalid.