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A lot of people have been curious about what exactly makes PIE different from the several other projects out there which attempt to implement some level of CSS3 support in IE. There are so many aspects to CSS3 that it can be difficult determining what product tackles what pieces.

To help answer that question, I’ve added a new page to the documentation: Comparing PIE to Other CSS3 Products.

I’ve set up a quick-and-dirty online discussion forum at http://css3pie.com/forum/ for PIE users. This is the new venue for posting questions, getting troubleshooting help, and other PIE-related discussions. Hopefully it is a much more convenient channel, that doesn’t require sifting through lots of email like the mailing list did.

As usual, please keep discussions on-topic and civilized. If you’re needing troubleshooting help, please make sure you’ve read through the documentation and known issues, and check previously posted forum questions to make sure your issue hasn’t already been addressed.

PIE developer discussion will still happen on the Dev mailing list.

I thought we were doing well the first day, but yesterday our traffic was about triple! We’ve started getting some great feedback as people have a chance to try it out on real projects. Lots of happy campers, quite a few great bug reports, and some troubleshooting questions.

It’s clear that we really need a good user/community support venue, so users can ask questions, see previous answers, and help out others in need. We do have a users mailing list set up for that sort of thing, but it’s clear people don’t like mailing lists and an online forum would be a much better choice. So I will be setting up a forum as soon as possible.

Another subject at the top of people’s minds is performance. It’s a big priority for me as well. I’ve made efforts to make PIE as efficient as possible since I started work on it, but it’s clear there are still improvements to be made. Of course at some point we’re simply at the mercy of how fast IE can render things, and some features will always be slower than others.

Along those lines, I’ll be starting to compile a “performance tips and tricks” document which lists some common things to avoid. First on that list: avoid putting box-shadow around the size of the entire page. You know, like we do on css3pie.com! It’s very pretty but hasn’t shown PIE’s performance in its best light, so we’ll likely be modifying that aspect of the site design to make it less sluggish. Live and learn.

It’s been a whirlwind of excitement since we launched PIE into public beta around 24 hours ago. All we did was post an announcement on Twitter, and it spread like wildfire from there. I’ve been fascinated with watching the network effects take over; we’ve seen hundreds of retweets, numerous posts on social bookmarking sites, and the css3pie.com website has seen just shy of 3000 unique visitors from 76 different countries. Not bad at all, especially considering it’s mostly Twitter traffic.

The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. It’s clear people are very excited about PIE and the possibilities it creates. We’ve been in touch with some other CSS-related projects to discuss cross-project integration, so it’s possible you’ll see PIE integrated with some of your favorite tools.

We have also had some good bug reports come in already. I’d like to remind people that this is a first beta release, so there are undoubtedly many bugs to be found and fixed. We need help finding them, so please, put PIE through its paces and open bug reports for us.

Happy CSS3 coding!

CSS3 PIE version 1.0 beta 1 has been officially released!

Prior to this point, PIE has been developed and tested under the radar, with very few people aware of its existence. With this, the first public beta release, I am confident saying it is ready for widespread use. I would like to thank the private alpha testers who provided valuable feedback over the past couple months and helped get it in shape for public release. Thanks guys, and you are now finally free to shout out to the world about PIE!

Along with this public beta release comes the brand spanking new css3pie.com website complete with documentation, a demos section, info about user/community support, and a slick design (implemented using CSS3 and PIE, of course) courtesy of my wonderful wife Julie. Don’t you just love that logo?

PIE aims to bring CSS3 decoration features into the mainstream, years ahead of schedule, by implementing seamless rendering in Internet Explorer 6-8. By releasing this beta, we hope to get lots of people using it and providing feedback so we can continue to improve and make it a standard tool in the Web development arsenal. Please spread the word!