Finally there is an editor for those of us whose recreational activities don’t include html development.

Remember your childhood where drawing masterpieces on walls was acceptable? Those were times when, though you had a lot to say, you didn’t stop and search for proper tools to express your ideas. You still have a lot to say to your friends, family, and even the strangers you have yet to introduce yourself to. And of course, who wants to be slowed down when the question “how?” sneaks up on them.

We told our resident rocket scientists that we needed an editor to capture our imagination. The scientists sharpened their pencils, exchanged some jargon, entered their laboratory, warmed up with Wii, dueled with Xbox, violently fought with Playstation, and finally presented us with their creation: Echo Email Editor.

The first thing we saw was “Courtesy of EkoBuzz templates” section. They are a gallery of exquisite email designs: casual and professional, sophisticated and simple, fancy and conservative, modern and classic, vivid and reserved. We discovered that each template has descriptions that pop up every time the cursor hovers over it: who could ever think that rocket scientists are creative?

We clicked on a random thumbnail and next thing we saw was canvas filled with a full-size version of our email design divided into smaller blocks of text and graphics.

Each block has a small toolbar with three buttons: edit, copy, and delete.
Clicking ‘edit’ made two things happen simultaneously; the toolbar changed to display two buttons ‘save’ and ‘cancel’ and the entire block became active and ready for editing. Since we preferred to get rid of a few boxes, we were able to delete them with a simple click on the third image of the toolbar- the trash can .

After fooling around with the format of the first graphic box, we wanted to repeat the same design on the bottom of our email. We clicked ‘copy’ and immediately an identical textbox appeared ready to be dragged to the bottom of our template. Our box even resized itself to fit perfectly in its new place.

Conveniently, our rocket scientists designed a palette of controls on the left-hand side of the editing page.

Yes, my attentive reader – controls at your fingertips. But these controls serve only one purpose: they feed your imagination! There were controls to change font face, size, color, background colors, create borders, move the text around and turn text into URL. Finally, there was a “Preview” button that displayed our masterpiece to show how a person on our contact list would view it.

The “Image Manager” button deserves special attention. It opens up the Image Gallery.
We clicked on one of images from the gallery and watched it being inserted into the spot in a block where we had placed our cursor inside the block. Our scientists also ensured that resizing the image would not skew, distort, or break its proportions. This means that in order for the image to look its best, the size does not matter. Then we remembered that another block would be a better place for this image. Without breaking sweat, we hit the trash can and image disappeared.

To see more of our adventures through the editor visit Part 2.