Happy Holidays: Squarespace For iPad Has Arrived

Squarespace for iPad is finally here and just in time for the holidays.  Consider it our holiday gift to you.  The iPad's extra real estate gave us much more room to breathe and allowed us to pack quite a bit more into the mobile Squarespace experience. If you've used Squarespace for the iPhone, you'll feel right at home with the iPad version.

Editing posts on the iPad is a great experience -- you'll see tags, categories, excerpts, comment counts, and the post's author along with the date and time.  Tapping a post or comment now opens a tray below the post containing your options for action.  This lets you take action without losing sight of the post you have selected.

The post editor is now one of the most powerful iOS text editors this side of Pages.  A good portion of the web editor has made it into the iPad app.  Just like in the iPhone version, you can change editing modes (Text, Markdown, Textile, Raw HTML), but now, if you're in Markdown, Textile, or Raw HTML, you'll be able to bold text, italicize, mark quotations, insert photos and links, and even set an excerpt!  Plus, you'll find a very handy pair of undo/redo buttons in the top left.

We've spent an immense amount of time on the details of the user interface -- and we hope you'll download the app to experience it for yourself.  As our primary mobile developer Chris Cox says, "It's bad ass."

As always with a new release, if you notice any oddities, please let us know by opening up a support ticket through Website Management > Support Tickets area in your account manager.

Update on 2011-01-14 18:05 by M. Burstiner

Squarespace for iPad was just updated to v1.0.1 with a boatload of bugfixes including:

• Fixes description text when switching from text post to html, markdown, or textile 
• Crash when not saving new post
• Fixes crash when in landscape and switching to comments tab with no comments
• Fixes changing the title for an account, it is now immediately reflected on the background pages 
• Fixes no-internet connection local draft saving 
• Fixes pending & new comments sort order in manage list 
• Fixes change options in manage page for local draft posts 
• Adds clone post when saving as iPad draft 
• Improved image cache and downloading post images speed and efficiency 
• Fixes manual scrolling for large posts in editor

Location, Location, Location

Today, I'm excited to announce the launch of our location widget. As the first widget of it's kind to natively display all of your checkins alongside a live map, it's a natural complement to our other social widgets to fully customize your Squarespace website. Whether you're on Foursquare, Gowalla or Facebook Places, you can treat your visitors to a visualization of where you've been. Like all things Squarespace, no code is required and the widget is fully customizable in both style and substance. Choose whether to show your check-in messages, toggle venue icons, dates, the map and how many checkins to display.

I can imagine musical artists on Squarespace will love this for when they're on tour. Anybody who's building an online presence should go try it right now. Be sure to tell us how you plan on using the widget in the comments, and show us your version by tweeting @Squarespace with your site. Mike O'Brien, our lead programmer on the location widget project, would love your feedback to make the widget the best it can be. As always, should you come across any funky behavior, open up a support ticket and we'll take care of it for you.

Cheers,
Davin

Ready To Lead

It is with great pride that I announce today that Anthony Casalena, our founder, will be taking over as the CEO of Squarespace moving forward. 

Since starting Squarespace in his dorm room in 2003,  Anthony has always actively lead the company in its vision, strategy, design and product -- and is now more than ready to provide continued leadership for its next exciting chapter.  My three years here have been deeply rewarding, going from being the second employee to a team of 45 in a rapidly growing, profitable company. This is a decision we have all worked toward and I will continue to support Anthony and the company as an advisor to the board and a close friend to the team.

It has been a pleasure seeing people's dreams supported by our service.  Keep an eye on the company as it is headed toward exciting things!

Feature Release: Autosave

This week, autosave was rolled out to every user. You'll see autosave in your blog post editor just to the left of the word count. Every 30 seconds, your post will be autosaved so that if you should accidentally navigate away from the page, or your browser should crash, your content is saved. The most you'll ever lose is 30 seconds' worth. It's worth noting: the cancel button will always override autosave. If at any point you click cancel, your changes will not be made. In addition, autosave is non-destructive. It will only trigger when content is added, to prevent accidental deletion. If you modify a post, remove content, and do nothing else, it will not save until you click save, confirming that deleting content was intentional. Autosave is only currently active in the blog editor.

If you do happen to notice any oddities, please open up a support ticket and we'll get you fixed up! 

Enjoy!
M! 

Squarespace Holiday Party 2010

It's that time of year again. Trees are going up, we're still polishing off turkey day leftovers, and it's getting colder. What do you say we gather together? You know, for warmth. We're throwing our third annual holiday bash and we'd love for you to come. If you've never been to one of our holiday parties before, you're in for a treat. We pull out all the stops. Last year, we had a photo booth, rock band, burgers, drinks a plenty, and an incredible DJ. This year, we're hoping to raise the bar again.

This year, we're bringing back the video game projector room, drinks are on us, and of course, we'll have some incredible music. We think it'll draw an eclectic crowd if you catch our drift. ;)

Do us a favor and RSVP so we know how many of you to expect!

Looking forward to seeing you here!
M!