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.