More than 3 million people use MailChimp to design and send email marketing campaigns. And today they launched a native iPad client that lets you create and edit such campaigns. For the parts of that which require rich text editing they rely on our DTRichTextEditor component.
Amro Mousa, Senior Mobile Developer at MailChimp, shared his experience implementing DTRichTextEditor.
When we set out to build a native campaign editor for the iPad, a big unknown was implementing native rich text editing and going to/from HTML. We tried web-based solutions but they were sluggish and unresponsive. We were very excited when we found DTCoreText and DTRichTextEditor.
Amro took a very active role in improving the underlying DTCoreText open source component. Especially his implementation of CSS cascading was the main driving factor behind the several of the most recent releases of DTCoreText.
Amro continues:
A few feature requests and contributions later, we were able to use DTRichTextEditor as the core of our rich text editor. This saved an incredible amount of effort. DTRichTextEditor is fantastic.
The result is a beautiful user experience running on the iPad.
MailChimp’s CEO Ben Chestnut blogged about the app launch. There he explains why they created a native client even though they recently made their online HTML-based solutions way more smartphone-friendly. Who needs a native app?
Teams don’t always build email campaigns together, huddled around a computer and collaborating. More often, teams have people who work on content, people who work on design, and someone in charge of pulling the whole thing together and sending it (an editor, if you will). And they’re almost never in the same room at the same time. So they email each other.
And we all know what it’s like to receive those seemingly endless back-and-forth emails during the revision process. Editor helps facilitate asynchronous collaboration among teams, so it’s easier for them to build and send campaigns. Plus it has a few other tricks up its sleeve.
So the reality of people working together while not being in the same room plus the need to have an offline-capable solution prompted them to invest in a native MailChimp Editor.
With iOS 7 looming many developers are looking for solutions that will allow them to support both iOS 6 and iOS 7 during the transition period everybody is expecting. It is the ideal and most feature-rich solution to have future-proof rich text editing on iOS devices. And now MailChimp Editor for iPad is the poster child to show it off in action.
The app looks so inviting that I myself am also considering signing up for a free MailChimp account, just so that I can take it for a spin. The app is available for free on the app store.
DTCoreText is Open Source on GitHub. And DTRichTextEditor is available to license for your own projects on the Cocoanetics Parts Store.
Categories: Reviews