Some substantial stuff here.

More scalable architecture — In this iteration, we have eliminated one important bottleneck. Now we can keep adding servers to meet new usage demand until we have ten times as much users now. By that time, the next bottleneck would also be resolved.

Viewport — EditGrid now loads data onto your browser on demand. Think Google Maps: only when you scroll to a new place on the map, would the map data be transferred to your browser. There is also a smart pre-loading mechanism, so most of the time you don’t need to wait for data to be transferred. Its significance? It hugely improves the initialisation time for large spreadsheets. Before Public Beta 18, all the data on the spreadsheet must be fully transmitted to your browser before the spreadsheet can be set up. Large spreadsheet? Tough — you may as well fetch a cup of tea while waiting. Now? It’s as if you’re just loading a spreadsheet as large as your screen allows.

Workspace Revamp — Our workspace was getting clobbered we added more and more features for you. This major revamp gives you a much more friendly user experience. Let’s thank Reuters for this new feature.

Better Safari Support — We respect our users’ browser choice. Efforts have been spent to make EditGrid work better in Safari. There is still a major issue: Safari in its current release does not support the border-box model, which is intensively used in EditGrid. However, Safari’s next version, which Mac OS X users can preview at WebKit, will support this. We are now testing EditGrid at its nightly build already. When it comes out, we will declare full support. Hope it won’t take long.

Partner API — In line with our partnership strategy, here we officially announce the availability of Partner API which gives our partners full power when integrating the next killer app with EditGrid.

Okay. That’s it.

What will be in Public Beta 19? Sorry, there won’t be Public Beta 19. The next version will be v1.0.

Yes, out of beta.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 25th, 2007 at 12:38 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.