2008/03/18

MindTouch Deki "Itasca" Release

MindTouch Deki "Itasca" is the first major release since "Hayes" last June. This is an exciting release because it includes many new features, significant performance improvements, usability enhancements, and a new tool that makes it a lot easier to create data mashups and composite applications. I'll highlight some key new features in this newsletter, but I encourage you to review the full release notes.

• Smart link dialog with auto-linking: select text, click link on Editor Toolbar, MindTouch Deki will automatically search pages and file attachments to find the most relevant information.

• Create composite applications and data mashups using a new dialog that gives users access to the more than 100 extensions to applications from Yahoo!, Google, Microsoft, and more! Without knowing how to program users can stitch together services from all over the web or from within their own Intranet to create situational applications and dynamic reports from multiple data sources and applications.
  
  For more information about these new dialogs or to see them action watch Guerric's demo video he uploaded to the MindTouch account at Viddler.

• SVN, Mantis, Trac, and Atlassian Jira integration coupled with syntax highlighting for 15 programming languages and the capability to show sample code next to executing code makes MindTouch Deki the ultimate software development collaboration platform. With MindTouch Deki software engineers, testers and project managers are able to connect several systems and organize their everyday work tools in a manner most efficient to them. Take a look at how we're using this integration at our developer community, OpenGarden. Or review this sample page:

• Support for Multiple Editors - FCKeditor and TinyMCE. We're still working out some bugs, but we're committed to supporting Opera and Safari browsers and both FCKeditor and TinyMCE support these browsers.

• More than 100 bugs squashed and significantly improved performance
• Improved OpenLDAP and eDirectory support
• Internal Group Management
• and more...

Download MindTouch Deki now!

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Upgrade your MindTouch Deki

MindTouch Deki EC2 (Beta)

If you’re not familiar with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), it's a Xen-based virtual hosting solution. Some of its outstanding features include flexible "pay as you go” pricing and a high degree of scalability. Thanks to MindTouch Deki's existing integration with Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) for file attachments all your files will also be stored by Amazon. In layman terms, this gives you a flexible, easy to manage, and cost efficient way to deploy MindTouch Deki on a dedicated server with Amazon as your deployment partner.

To set up MindTouch Deki with EC2 you need to have an EC2 account; so, sign up for an account today by visiting Amazon's Web Services home page. For more information about this innovative and flexible deployment option visit our documentation on this subject.

Dream Emerald (1.5.0) Released

Dream, the foundational technology of MindTouch Deki also has a new major release named “Emerald”. This is the follow-up version to “Denim” which shipped last September. Since then, we’ve done many improvements to this versatile library and REST micro-server. Dream greatly simplifies REST-oriented programming without introducing abstractions that obfuscate the versatility of HTTP. Dream includes classes such as Plug and XUri that make the WebRequest and Uri/UriBuilder classes obsolete. Dream promotes better programming practices and requires significantly less lines of code. Similarly, the XDoc class is a generalization of XmlDocument, XmlNode, and XmlNodeList that streamlines direct operations on XML documents, alleviating the need for generated wrapper classes. To learn more about MindTouch Dream and the architecture of MindTouch Deki visit our technology page. Or you can read the Dream "Emerald" release notes.

New Free MindTouch Deki Hosting

It's official, you can now get free MindTouch Deki hosting, powered by MindTouch, at http://wik.is. This new service is full featured and ad-free. Site registration at Wik.is takes seconds and instantly creates a new MindTouch Deki site for authoring and sharing content. This service is ideal for enterprise teams, workgroups, and power users who need a highly usable and functional online tool for sharing information, creating dynamic reports, and building powerful mashups.

Wik.is is free with 100MB of storage, unlimited users, unlimited pages, unlimited access to the API, and, most importantly...did I mention...without advertising! A “Pro” upgrade is available for $99 a year with 10GB of storage and full site customization.

I hope you enjoy the new services and bits and as always, please help us spread the word by re-posting to your blogs, wearing your MindTouch Tshirts, sporting your MindTouch stickers, and just generally telling all your friends about MindTouch. :-) If you don't have stickers and tshirts contact DamienH [at] MindTouch [dot] com.