PageLayer 0.3

It's live: PageLayer version 0.3, with plenty of new features and improvements:

• Integrated history: to Undo/Redo any changes
• Improved user experience (Drag & Drop, Resizing, Text Editor, Image Editor)
• Improved readability with new color scheme, new UI skin and icons
  
• New building blocks, more simple yet robust and useful
  
• User interface feedback through color codes in the Tool bar
  
• Improved stability, hundreds of bugs fixed

The demo is online so feel free to give it a try.

I am really proud of this software and the way it improved in the past few months. I surprised myself having great fun using it: as a programmer I tend to prefer messing around in the code to fix my websites but it's so much easier with PageLayer! :)

PageLayer is starting its product life with some real life projects to be launched soon. The feedback from the first users will be invaluable to the future development of PageLayer.
For now PageLayer will be distributed along with web design and development services to ensure a smooth integration. But as soon as it hits the commercial requirements, the licensing program will start and PageLayer will be made available for distribution.

Stay tuned: it's happening soon.

{width: 100%; float: left;} and Crash!

during the stressful process of testing and finalizing version 0.3 of PageLayer I suddenly ran into the Internet Explorer bug of death! During a block "drag and drop", the browser happened to crash violently, randomly and with no more explanation than the terrible "Internet Explorer has encountered a problem and needs to close..." message and an obscure reference to MSHTML.DLL

This is probably the worst thing that can happen to a web developer and I felt rather depressed at this point.

After several hours of desperate googling, testing, code commenting and the usual swearing that comes with that sort of event, I narrowed the problem down to a CSS file. That was one of the most frustrating bug hunts I had to do for quite some time: commenting CSS declarations and testing for several minutes every time, to see if a random bug would appear, while not being sure if it was fixed or just not happening. Grrrgh!

The problem lay in a class that gave a width of 100% and a float left property to my demo site's footer. I found some people talking about this, after I found the problem myself but it does not appear to be a very well known problem. The crash occurred when dragging blocks around in PageLayer, slightly changing the width of the main DIV container. Apparently, IE could not cope with this variation and adjust the width of the floating footer.

It's fixed now but I caught myself remembering the good old time of tables.

Floats Wrapping Priority - Internet Explorer vs Firefox

I ran into this problem while trying to make the PageLayer toolbar to behave properly.

The toolbar is a collection of float left divs containers (toolsets) embedding other float left divs (buttons / links). In a way, it has an onion skin structure: floats inside floats inside ... floats.

The problem is, as you can see in the screenshot, about priority: Firefox makes the outer divs wrap first (what you expect), Internet Explorer makes the inner divs wrap first (what you execrate).

I could not find much help online as it appears not to be a very well known problem (?).

The (very bad) solution I have got so far is to "clear right" the innermost divs which has for effect to make the containers (toolsets) to wrap properly but to lock the cleared divs: they do not wrap anymore in IE.

As anyone worked out a good solution for this problem? I'd like to hear about it!

PageLayer's Inline Image Editor

Here is a short video demonstration of the image crop/resize feature in PageLayer. That sort of manipulation usually requires an extra software as Photoshop to get the image right before integrating to the webpage. In PageLayer all of this is done inline, directly in the web page. Have a look at the video and go have a try with the demo at http://www.pagelayer.com

Note: sorry for the french accent, I am working on that.

Web Editing and Content Management

I have been working in the web industry for the last 10 years and ran into the same problems, over and over with poorly served solutions. So last year, when the opportunity arose, I decided to try and harness one of the major issue in web development, the holly grail of the web designer and developer: the ultimate WYSIWYG editor.

The Web started static, with editing tools like FrontPage or Dreamweaver to help a minority of HTML savvy people to build their personal homepage. With the introduction of high-level server scripting languages (PHP/ASP/Coldfusion), Websites were built with a "back-office", often custom-made, to enable content administration by the end-users. Today, open source Content Management Systems like Joomla give some more freedom, at low cost, to edit and custom build a website with minimal skills. But these tools still require a training course for the average user and can be tricky. They do not offer an instant result: you still have to go through the back-office and fill in forms that do not match the final layout.

Whatever the tool, it still look like this when you come to edit web pages:
- Update/Add content from the back-office
- Check the output on the website
- Go back to the back-office to fix the glitches
- Repeat from step one until you get the wanted result

If you want to add an image, you have to go through a extra software to resize/crop and re-sample before to upload. In many cases you end-up with a poorly resized/compressed image that does not fit your layout.

How come that you can easily edit and style a text document with your word processor but you can't do the same with your website?

We now have enough maturity with technologies like Ajax, powerful CPUs to run heavy Javascript and big broadband connections to do such a thing. The Web standards have become a priority in web development and we all use stable and mature web browsers. We just lack the right piece of software ... I am trying to build it: it is called PageLayer.

PageLayer provides all the basic styling feature you need on a web page. You can move things around to re-organize your content. It includes an image editor with the features you need for you website and keep an original version of your pictures for you to be able to change your mind and crop/resize again without quality loss. All of this happens in your browser, directly on your website, using your layout.

Check-out the PageLayer demo to understand how easy web editing can be. Just imagine how fast you can update a website with such a tool.

Sadcamp

It's been a busy week for me. Very tense too, waiting for the Seedcamp judges answer. Sadly I did not make it to the short list.

I expected failure for a few reasons:
- the lack of a team: I am currently working alone.
- a business plan that does not match the 2.0 social trend?
- revenues expectations a little low, maybe, for venture capitalists
- strong competitors (Google?)
- a too old founder: I am over 30 now :(

Finally, my project is still in the very (too) early stage and will involve a lot of development to get ready for a public use. I have a good prototype running but it is not yet a complete software.

The only regret I have so far, is that Seedcamp did not provide any feedback on the unsuccessful applications. I realize they are very busy, but the idea has been discussed on their forum and I am sure they could answer that need quite easily. We'll see.

So it is time for me to go the next step on my own and try to spread the word about my work. For those who are interested into web development and Javascript, have a look at www.pagelayer.com. I would be more than happy to get some feedback about PageLayer: I am seeking some cheering up to keep working.

Stay tuned, I'll keep posting about PageLayer and the way it evolves.

P2P Financial Loan in France

www.friendsclear.com has applied to Seedcamp. Another promising French start-up is taking the challenge to just become big. It's not that I am being patriotic, but I am so glad to see French people getting over the usual and traditional fear of success - or failure. France (and Europe to be fair and less patriotic) has a lot of very talented people with the will to succeed. It is now notorious that we just lack some momentum, daring investors and the right place to mix them all up together in order to achieve success. London, with Seedcamp, could be that place.

The Friendsclear chaps have had some fears about the "huge" contribution (10% stake for EUR50K) announced by Seedcamp, but they went over it, with reason I am sure, as it is an extraordinary chance to meet the right people, at the right time and get all the benefits from it.

In my opinion, it is just a shame that all of this happens 3 years after the first signs of the expending web 2.0 bubble in the US. Once again we are late. But wait, the bubble hasn't burst yet and something is coming along. Small companies are applying, working tremendously to polish their prototypes, building up networks and blogs just to let the world know they exist and that the future of the web has to go with them. This is just great!

I just cross all the fingers I have got for them as I believe they have all they need to succeed.

Go France!

The guys at Upshot are making a lot of noise about their application to Seedcamp. I am glad to see some frenchies fighting their way up to the start-ups nirvana.

The Upshot website does not tell much about the product but that's what start-ups are all about, right? Anyway, their idea looks good and as they say: "Upshot in London, it's cool"

I am expecting some more participants to have their say too, but the Seedcamp community appears to be very quiet so far. (Is this because of confidentiality?)

Well, I am a little bit jealous and would like to have such buzz about my application too: I am actually a frenchy in a sort of an outpost position, already on the right side of the English Channel.

For that, I would need to give away a link to some sort of demo, but wait, I am just keeping the logs clean to spy on the Seedcamp guys and check when they give my baby a little run ;)

Applied

Here we go. I applied to Seedcamp and I am now fingers crossed waiting for an answer.

The rules were strict but they said "it's OK to break the rules", so I did. If ever I get selected, I will probably end up being the older guy around, and certainly the only one alone. Lacking what is expected to be a "solid core team" is my biggest disadvantage and what makes me a "not so good match" for what Seedcamp is looking for.

Anyway, I believe in my product, I am proud of my prototype and all the people who have seen it so far have been really enthusiastic (well, mainly ... some were jealous though).

If it does not work out, I will keep trying, my way.

Seedcamp: Europe on the Move!

A lot of people have been waiting for it. It now happens.

Saul Klein started it last year with TAG, now launching the most American-like platform in Europe to help, promote and fund young entrepreneurs.

Seedcamp takes inspiration from the know famous Paul Graham's YCombinator offering what is painfully lacking here on the old continent: an attraction pole for daring young developers to gain confidence and enough money to launch their company.

This "Start-up Idol" concept can be seen by some people as very expensive for the funded company: from the 20 selected, 5 winners will receive €50K each for a 10% stake. That's not really a bargain I think, but all the mentoring and networking provided by Seedcamp is probably the most valuable part of the deal when you are a business newbie.

Even though I am not really in the "young" entrepreneur category anymore (argh!), I am going to apply with my new project (that is still secret, sorry). Hopefully I will gain a lot of insight from this experience.

... and back to the ground

The peak in the Sportstar Simulator's stats did not stay for long. I still do not know what was the cause of this. Anyway, the game is still doing between 500 and 1000 hits a month and I am happy with that.

I, sometimes, receive an email from a visitor asking about the next version/improvement/bug fix and I try to do my best to make them happy. But I guess the simulator is now going to stay as it is.

The original idea was to implement a terrain engine to stream data (textures and elevation) from the server and offer a greater area to explore. That was really challenging and I gave up to be able to publish a version in time. Shockwave (Lingo) was not fast enough to build a proper ROAM algorithm and I had to come up with a homemade Level Of Detail system; just to discover that the texture swap was slow too, freezing the game for a few milliseconds every now and then. Using Havok for collisions was a nightmare when applied to a dynamic mesh and my shared hosting server was struggling to generate and deliver the textures.

I sometimes think it could be nice to use the Google map images as textures in such an application: they have the big machines and broad pipes. It's all nice and sliced up in little squared chunks, ready to be mapped on the mesh and fast delivered :)

Another time may be. For now the terrain is a single mesh object with a poor resolution but easier to integrate in the game. The focus, anyway, was on the plane and its flight characteristics.

Reaching for the sky ...

I do not know what happened. The Sportstar Simulator has been online for almost 2 years now, but it never exceeded the 500 hits a month. I checked my stats today and .. and last week ... on Tuesday ... over 3,000 people went to play my little simulator. My web hosting provider must be wondering where have gone all these 2 Gigs of data. I am glad that somebody found it fun enough to post a link somewhere on a major blog or news site.

Because my hosting is not really "state of the art", I do not have any referrer data so can not guess where all these visitors came from (a shame).

Also, because I am not really a clever business guy, I did not put any Google ads on the hotlinked page: so I missed a good deal of clicks and money (a shame again).

Anyway, the Sportstar simulator has never been designed to make me rich. That was just fun to do and I am glad some people around seem to find it fun too.

That makes me wonder if I should not take it more seriously and make it better. The technology behind (shockwave) is pretty old now and performances do not permit a lot. I have been waiting for MacromediAdobe to bring it a step further but they appear to get stuck with the old school 3D engine they built, back in the last millennium.

A shame, I tell you. And if you look close enough to this little peace of online software. If you realize that I built it up from nothing with no money in just a few month - they you can wonder why the Microsoft Flight Simulator 70 people highly skilled and greatly financed team can not do any better with collision detection or crash effects.

A shame!