I recently interviewed one of the Software Engineers at NewsGator, Mark Lubischer, who was instrumental in developing the new version of Editor's Desk (2.1), which we recently launched.  This will give you an inside scoop into its creation.

Josh: What was the overriding priority in redesigning v 2.1?
Mark: There were a number of goals that we were after.  One of them was to make Editor’s Desk a lot more visually appealing. Another goal was to improve the usability by changing around some workflows to decrease the number of clicks required to build a widget.  Finally, we wanted to speed things up and reduce the clutter of the Manage and other pages; some of our clients have literally created thousands of widgets and rendering times for the Manage page would have increased to unacceptable levels.

Josh: What was/were some of the biggest technical hurdle(s) the team had to overcome?
Mark: Probably the biggest hurdle that we had to overcome was backward compatibility.  With the major changes to the widget builder, we had to ensure that all the previously built widgets would be compatible with the new workflows and the new code that we wrote.  Additionally, we spent a lot of time working to make sure that no functionality was lost and that users accustomed to the previous version would be able to jump right in and use it without having to relearn the system.

Josh: I’ve been told that v 2.1 is 30% faster than the previous version – how did you make this possible?
Mark: To make the new version faster, we took a look at what things were taking too long to load/render and determined why it was happening.  To get past some of these issues, we changed around when display items were rendered into the browser’s DOM and went to a lazy load approach instead of the previous optimistic rendering.  Additionally, we did a lot of work to decrease the size and number of files being served to the browser.  We shifted a lot of our layouts into templates that could be requested on demand when the user needed to access a certain feature of Editor’s Desk.  This way they wouldn’t be downloading things that they didn’t need and would only have to load it if they were going to use it.

Josh: What’s your favorite feature, either from a development standpoint, or end user standpoint of the new editor’s desk?
Mark: A number of favorite things come to mind right away…

• Resizable text areas in the Edit HTML mode
• Horizontal vs. Vertical Edit HTML layouts
• Increased performance
• The improved customize options (some really cool new stuff is on the way!)
• Ease of extensibility (we made it a lot easier for us to build onto in the future)
• Overall better look and feel