Developing eWrite

Some drafts back from thelogocompany.net. I emailed them only yesterday (late in the day) and they got back to me this morning with some suggestions below. I wanted to expand on draft 5 from the previous drafts to see  how it would look specifically for eWrite Lite instead of a company logo. I think I prefer draft 6 or 7. Not too pushed about the extra bells and whistles.

draft 6

draft 7

draft 8

draft 9

Tomorrow morning I will be emailing a potential client who wants to use eWrite for their website to tell them I can’t help them.

Their site is using ASP.NET and Microsoft SQL Server. I currently only have eWrite Lite using PHP and mySQL.

So my options are to let them know that I don’t have a version of eWrite that will work on their site or else try to get them to host their site with Blacknight.

I’ve contacted their service provider in England. They don’t have mySQL or PHP on their servers and don’t plan to any time in the future. Bummer.

Im fairly sure they won’t want to change their site hosting as they have a close relationship with their current providers and also have other website related databases hosted there.

To add insult to injury, when I demoed eWrite Lite to them they expressed an interest in franchising eWrite Lite in relation to a web design company they are involved in. This would be great for eWrite Lite but alas I don’t think they’ll be jumping up and down about it right now.

As a result of this I’m wondering should I build a .NET version of eWrite Lite? I worked with ASP long before I worked with PHP and so getting into .NET wouldn’t be beyond me. I’m out of the loop on MS stuff though so wondering what costs I will be facing if I go down this road. Do I need a licence of any kind to write .NET apps? Can anyone recommend a good IDE for .NET ? I wonder is there an app out there to convert PHP code to .NET code which might save some time

I received 5 concepts back from thelogocompany today.  Theres something I like in each one. You’ll probably guess that I mentioned that I like the Thunderbird logo in the forms when I was filling them out.

For now, I’m tinkering around with ideas before I get back to them with enough information to move on. So far, I’m impressed.What do you think ?

draft 1

draft 2

draft 3

draft 4

draft 5

Just added a ‘Digg this’ option to the blog side panel, hopefully it will get the word out about this blog. Please digg this if you can.

Later this week I’ll have a couple of good blog posts about business card drafts, paying for proprietary software and eWrite Demo revisited.

Thanks to all those who have signed up to the RSS feed so far.

I’ve just completed the forms over at thelogocompany.net to get their super deluxe option of Logo Design, Stationery Design plus 500 business cards for just 187 Euro.

Their forms are pretty good and thorough. I’m very excited to see what will be designed. I’ll have to wait about 3 working days. As soon as I get anything I’ll be blogging about it here and including images.

I just got a link from Darragh Doyle on Twitter about the EI information workshops. It sounds right up my alley and I’ve sent an email to get more information about participating.

Head on over and take a look if you are developing something or have an idea in mind.

Here is a screenshot of eWrite Lite as it current looks. (Click to enlarge)

Existing clients log into eWrite Lite by going to www.ewritecork.com and logging in via the client login on the top of the site. This may soon change, but thats for a later post.

The screen shot shows the main ‘dashboard’ which is visible when a user logs in. To get back to this screen from any other section a user need only press on the eWrite Lite heading or the little Home image along the top.

This dashboard provides a couple of quick links to various items. The first cool thing is the screen shot of users own website. This is updated any time the homepage of the site it changed. The ability to update this thumbnail is thanks to Picoshot and Thumbalizr.

Next to the screenshot a user can see the total visitors to their site today. eWrite Lite has its own scripts for recording the traffic to the site but also uses Google Analytics to provide much more information and graphs.

Following this there are 5 of the most recently edited pages, these provide a quick link to open the page for editing using the TinyMCE editor. When a page is updated an RSS feed and Sitemap XML file are updated.

Below this a user can see the limits placed upon eWrite Lite. Its limited to 100 pages and 200MBs of storage for images, videos etc. Since eWrite Lite works on the clients exiting hosting these values could change.

On the right the latest couple of blog posts are visible. It is the eWrite News blog which a user can use to keep up to date of eWrite related news or developments.

The poll thats there are the moment is to see if existing users would like to be able to edit their images within eWrite Lite. Ever since I met Walter of Pixenate I’ve been interested in embedding Pixenate into eWrite if possible so that a person could make some changes to their images. It would save them using Photoshop which they probably won’t have with them if on the road.

The main menu on top has 3 buttons representing the primary areas. ‘Content Editor’, ‘Media Manager’ and ‘Support’. When pressed each one has a drop down menu containing only 2 or 3 items each.

The Content Editor section allows a user to open any existing pages or create a new page.

The Media Manager allows users to view all exiting media files such as images, video & audio and upload new files.

The Support provides a link to the eWrite Lite online manual which is currently being worked on to show short tutorial videos on how to use the various aspects of eWrite Lite. It also opens the client’s contact details so they can keep these up to date.

Future development plans

Overall, the plan is to keep eWrite simple and useful but there are still plenty of things I want to do.

Some future goals include stream lining the interface a bit, making moving back and fourth between sections a bit smoother so that a person could being writing a new page, move to another section to read another page perhaps and go back and continue editing the page they were working on.

Im also very interested in the current Mozilla Prism work. I would like to have eWrite Lite available on the desktop for a quick link or to be used offline and sync the pages when online later on.

So thats eWrite Lite as it currently stands. Its just a tad over 3 MB.

All comments and criticisms are welcome, and if anyone would like to meet or see eWrite in action on their site, let me know.