New look, view count, FireFox 2.0 search bar, and more
Public Beta 16 is EditGrid’s biggest major release so far, in terms of both time and effort spent, because we are making big changes! There are so many exciting new features in this release to talk about that I find it difficult to fit all in one blog post — so I won’t. Instead, I’ll split the introduction into multiple parts — some will be on the recently revamped EditGrid Wiki.
The most obvious changes made in this release is the new portal home page. There are now so many useful resources available on EditGrid — just take a look at the US Senate mid-term election results originally posted here or the world oil production data by Roberto — that are waiting for our users to discover. And now we have organised them into recent spreadsheets (RSS), popular spreadsheets (RSS), recent templates (RSS), popular templates (RSS) and random charts on the home page to facilitate you, as well as members of the public, to discover interesting and relevant materials. We have even added a tag cloud for you to browse through related spreadsheets. We’ve refrained from making a tag cloud until we think it useful — now it is.
(A bonus hint: if you’ve ever wondered why your spreadsheet aren’t displayed on the public listings, or how to remove your spreadsheet therefrom, here’s the answer: the public listings include spreadsheets which are public readable without password and public discoverable. To set whether a spreadsheet is public discoverable or not, simply go to the Share with Public tab at Sheet Properties and toggle the option. You may also set your user default at Preferences.)
The new portal home page has already brought about two new concepts: templates and popularity. Popularity is determined by a spreadsheet’s view count, now made available since this release. We’ll talk more about templates in a subsequent post.
Another exciting new feature is the OpenSearch plugin, which allows you to add EditGrid to browser’s search bar. If you use Mozilla FireFox 2.0 or Microsoft Internet Explorer 7, you shall see the search bar button highlighted when you visit EditGrid. Click it, and you may then add EditGrid Finder to your browser’s search bar as one of the available search engine! Performing a spreadsheet search will then be as simple as keying in a query in your browser and pressing [Enter].
That’s it for now — I’ll return to talk more about the other exciting new features, including templates and linked sheet. In the meantime, try out the above new features, and let us know whether you like them or not!