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This update has been months in the making, and is the sum total of hundreds of bits of feedback from passionate customers. We're pretty excited about it, but before we dig into all the gory details, here's a video showing some of the highlights:

The first thing you probably noticed is the new vertical split window. It's a huge improvement on the old horizontal split - now you can see most or all of your email as you add content to it.

As well as the new layout, we've got some more juicy improvements:

More flexible content items

By far the biggest request for the editor was more flexible content 'repeaters', so it was the first thing we built into this update. Now you can have a piece of content with 6 images, no images, 5 titles, whatever you like.

What this really means is total design flexibility. We can now implement a much wider range of designs for your template, and it will still be a piece of cake for you to add your content to.

Design with multiple layout options

This is probably our favorite new feature for the editor. Let's say you want some content with an image on the right for the first item, but on the left for the second, then back on the right again. Using the new template options, you can now specify any combo of different layouts in the same content 'repeater'.

Streamlined WYSIWYG editor

The experience of formatting content was another area we wanted to nail with this update. The first step was simplifying things. We've combined all the different ways to add special items to your content into a single "Insert" button. You can add a link, personalization, social sharing buttons plus lots of other goodies all from a clean menu system.

We've also given you the ability to tweak the font size for any content. This was a hard one for us. As designers we think most of this should be defined for our clients in the template itself, but the requests were overwhelming. We've also cleaned up and streamlined the way text is pasted (goodbye annoying popup), especially from places like Microsoft Word.

Add alt text to any images

Another shortcoming of the old editor meant you couldn't add alternate text to any images. Image blocking in many email clients makes alt text a valuable fallback when an image isn't loaded and it's now super easy for you to add or edit the alt text for any images you add.

On top of some of these larger improvements, we also snuck in a ton of other tasty treats. Drag and drop is now smoother, plus images now upload automatically and appear instantly.

Updated templates

To accommodate some of these great new features, we also made a number of changes to the existing template language. As part of the launch next week we'll be automatically converting all existing templates to use the updated tags. The changes aren't radical, but rest assured we've been working hard to make sure the transition will be a smooth one.

All this and more coming Monday, July 11

We'll be pushing the new editor to all accounts this weekend, so it will be ready to roll for you first thing Monday. This update has been a big effort by the developers, but none of it would have happened without the passionate feedback from all of you. We're always listening, so please keep it coming.