One of the really nice features of EditLive! is the highly responsive interface - dialogs open immediately without needing to send extra requests back to the server. That kind of responsiveness comes with a price though - when you first run EditLive! you have to wait for it to download. From then on, the files are all stored on the local machine so you never have to wait again but you still get the responsive interface. The engineers at Ephox have been working hard on making that initial experience better for users and it's something we'll continue to work on, but there are a number of improvements in the 6.2 release that you can take advantage of today.

Firstly, just by upgrading to 6.2 every EditLive! installation will find that the editor starts up faster. We've done a lot of work on start up times and overall performance so that once the files are downloaded everything's ready to go much sooner. We also provide much better feedback to users on startup progress and it just generally looks pretty.

Secondly, with just a minor modification to your site you can make that download time disappear for most users by taking advantage of the new QuickStart function. All you need to do a simple JavaScript function call somewhere like you're login page which will start the download of EditLive! in the background. In most cases by the time the user actually goes to edit their first bit of content the editor will already be downloaded and ready to go. The key advantage to this approach is that it won't distract the user at all. If they don't yet have Java installed it won't start installing it and there are no security dialogs that pop up. It just quietly goes about the download.

To make the experience as seamless as possible for users, we've carefully selected which environments to actually activate QuickStart in. It's all handle behind the scenes for you, but the best experience will be for people using IE on Windows where everything will be downloaded. For FireFox on Windows, we'll warm up the Java runtime but due to bugs in FireFox downloading the resources would sometimes interrupt the user's browsing so we don't actually start the download. On Mac even starting up the JRE might interrupt the user so QuickStart simply doesn't run on Mac. We'll be continuously reviewing what we can do to get more benefits from QuickStart so if you deploy it today you should automatically see the improvements when you upgrade in the future.

To set it up, just add the JavaScript below to the bottom of your login page or even every page on your site - it doesn't matter if the user visits multiple pages with QuickStart, the download will only happen once.

<script src="/product/editliveforjava/editlivejava/editlivejava.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">ephoxQuickStart("/product/editliveforjava/editlivejava/");</script>

The first script tag includes the EditLive! javascript library which provides the ephoxQuickStart function. The second one actually activates QuickStart. The parameter just specifies the EditLive! download directory where the editor resources are stored. With that one simple change your users will spend less time waiting for things to get started and can just focus on getting their work done which is what EditLive! is really about.

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