I have a confession to make. I love users. I know it's kind of illegal as a software developer, but I can't run away from that. Maybe I'm more of a software designer than developer and that can make it up for an excuse (at least compared to Kasper I'm much less a developer).
I love users because they help me form umbraco. I constantly have loads of ideas for new stuff in umbraco, but spending time and listen to users helps me enhance the existing stuff in umbraco. This has been done a lot of times and probably one of the reasons that umbraco seems much more polished than your average open source cms (or closed source for that matter).
So where am I going with this - what's the point? Well; I've spend the last couple of days helping Ebita educating twenty users (editors) in umbraco. The huge joy was to see how fast they learned umbraco. Two hours of intro and after lunch they started adding content to their coming portal.
People always have different needs and therefore they tend to like different parts of umbraco, but these people loved the automated scaling of images in the editor. When you scale an image in umbraco, the proportions are constrained and umbraco generates a new physical image on the server when you save, ensuring that it's smoother and smaller in size. These people simply took images from their digital cameras, inserted them in the editor of umbraco and then scaled them. No need for Photoshop or other external programs.
It was absolutely wonderful to see them having all the joy about this, but the mega pixel craze has hit digital cameras the last couple of years so the average image was something like 3000x2000. So every time they inserted an image the first 5 or 6 task was to scale, scale, scale the image down.
And here's the point - while Morten from Ebita helped these people, I spend an hour with javascripting joy. And by the time we wrapped up the day, I could tell them that when ever you insert an image into the editor that's more than 500 pixels wide, it's automatically inserted 500 pixels wide. No more need for scaling those 3000 pixels in six steps, and sure - you can scale it up or down afterwards.
It was a technical simple enhancement, but it was those twenty enthusiastic photo loving users who made me realize the need. Thank you!