Interclue has been in a transition phase lately.

Our Firefox add-ons continue to enjoy considerable support, with the Interclue flagship having passed 2.6 million downloads and Lazarus over 600,000 with one of the highest ratings on addons.mozilla.org, getting great reviews and excellent user feedback.

However Interclue, while still one of the most advanced browser add-ons ever built, has in truth had too many features from the beginning. Because of this, we are reluctant to add more, and even tweaking it is somewhat difficult.

Hence we are reworking the Interclue core with an eye to allowing support for Google Chrome and the new “Jetpack” extensions framework due in Firefox 4. We are also looking at IE8 and other browsers to see how we can work in with them.

As part of this transition we will move many Interclue features into optional plugins, so as to present a cleaner and more lightweight set of core features to new users. This will also allow us to open up API connection points so that application and data providers can leverage Interclue to extend their own offerings, which has always been our intent.

Of course, there will probably be a few more Interclue releases based on the old design while we get the new one up to speed.

Meanwhile, Lazarus for Chrome is available in beta, and early adopters are clamoring for the features they enjoyed in our Firefox version that have yet to be added to our Chrome version.

However, all this takes time and the struggle to keep our add-ons functional in the face of rapid browser evolution (amongst other things) has led to a lack of momentum in our premium feature development, and along with the global recession this led to our local angel funding drying up in late 2008 and a subsequent switch to bootstrapping ourselves via contract work in 2009 - further slowing our own own development agenda.

In 2010 we intend to reverse this trend, winding down our client contracts and releasing the first subscriber options for our add-ons, which should lead to the financial sustainability we need to more rapidly improve our existing add-ons and roll out new ones.

To help us reach these goals we have a superb new systems administrator, Jim Cheetham, who is currently upgrading our development environment to support a fully distributed operation, which will allow us to work with talented developers who share our values but cannot move to Christchurch (or wherever our HQ eventually ends up - Wellington or the SF Bay Area are leading contenders). We are also talking to other senior developers about joining our team. Feel free to contact us if you think you might be interested.

Our core mission remains the same: find new ways to help people get more value from the time they spend online. Do so without requiring them to abandon existing tools or learn complex new interfaces. Defend their privacy, security, and control over their online environment.

However, we are aware that peoples’ online environments are increasingly divergent. For instance, people now often use mobile and touchscreen devices to surf the web, or netbooks with smaller screens, and we have to take that into account (I actually started writing this post on my iPhone, while flying back from another fabulous Kiwi Foo Camp).

The timeline for all this is uncertain, but it will definitely accelerate when our first subscriber features are released or we find the right new investors, both of which we are hoping to achieve in the first half of this year.

Looking forward to making your web more clueful in 2010,

The Interclue Team,
Seth, Karl and Jim.

Interclue 1.6 introduces better image previews and two entirely new kinds of clue:

New Feature: HoverClues

This new type of clue occupies a useful middle ground between Linkclue Icons and the Clueviewer Window. They show more information and hence require more display space than Linkclues, but they appear at the bottom of the browser so they won’t get in your way. We think they’re great and hope you will too. Read more about HoverClues and see them in action.

New Feature: InlineClues

Sometimes it makes more sense to insert the information directly into the page rather than waiting for you to mouse over the links. We’ve started by adding clues to the search result pages for Yahoo, Google and Bing. The next version of Interclue will probably include some inline clues for Twitter. Inline clues are on by default but super easy to turn off - just click the [x] next to the clue.

• Optional Delicious Tags shown inline underneath search results on the 3 major search sites. Many thanks to Les Orchard for some very valuable advice on the Delicious Feed API while we were implementing this feature!
  
  
• Optional Search Refinement links on the 3 major search sites, powered by Surf Canyon

New Feature: Image Galleries

When you are looking at a preview of an image, and click on it to zoom in, an image gallery showing full size versions of all the images linked from a page will now appear, rather than trying to show a full sized image in the Clueviewer, which was problematic. Note that this applies for links to images, not for the situation where you are zooming in on an image that is only part of a page preview.

Tweaks, Bug & Compatibility Fixes

Tweaks

• Better handling of previewing images on Google Image Search.
• Linkclues now appear semi-transparent until you mouse over them.
• Increased max image size default to 256KB

Compatibility fixes:

• No longer overlaps Google SearchWiki icons.
• Improved icon positioning when Coolpreviews or WOT is installed
• Interclue 1.6 drops support for Firefox 2.x. Mozilla is no longer releasing security updates for Firefox 2.x and we strongly recommend updating to Firefox 3.5 if you haven’t already. Interclue runs better than ever on Firefox 3.5

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a javascript error when checking “click to preview” links
• Fixed a conflict with the MakeLink addon which prevented Interclue from being initalized
• del.icio.us popup now closes correctly after link has been saved.
• Fixed a bug with the “reset options” button.

There’s been quite a delay between the new release and this one. We’ve been a little distracted by our side project Lazarus Form Recovery, which recently became our second Mozilla Recommended Add-on. We’ve also been doing a bit of consulting work, making some cool add-ons for some cool companies - more about that later perhaps.

But we finally have a new Interclue version almost ready to release. Please download the beta and check it out. If you spot a bug, please let us know ASAP.

Interclue 1.6 introduces a great new feature, which we are currently calling HoverClues. These clues occupy a useful middle ground between our Linkclue Icons and the full size ClueViewer. They take up more space than the icons, but they add a lot more information and appear at the bottom of the browser rather than right next to the link, so they don’t get in your way.

So far they are active for a couple dozen different kinds of link, and we’re working on more types, eventually even including short content previews of “ordinary” pages, which are the hardest to do because there are a bazillion different kinds of “ordinary” web page.

As with more or less everything in Interclue, they’re optional - see the HoverClues panel on the advanced options tab - but if you think “they’d be great if only X” then please contact us and let us know what X is! HoverClues are a work in progress and you should expect significant improvements in the months to come.

Interclue 1.6 drops support for Firefox 2.x. Mozilla is no longer releasing security updates for Firefox 2.x and everyone should have moved to 3.x by now. We encourage people to try the new Firefox 3.5 Release Candidate. The javascript engine in Firefox 3.5 is blazing fast and makes Interclue run better than ever.

New features:

• HoverClues: Hintboxes that appear at the bottom of the page when you hover over certain types of link. Check out the test page.
• ShortURL redirection information in HoverClues, via the LongUrl.org API (great for twitter!)
• Optional Search refinement links, powered by Surf Canyon [more information here]
• Interclue can now show Delicious Tags inline underneath search results on the 3 major search sites - see the Search Enhancements Panel in the advanced options tab.

Tweaks

• Increased max image size default to 256KB

Compatibility fixes:

• No longer overlaps Google SearchWiki icons.
• Improved icon positioning when Coolpreviews installed

Update: Just put a new version up that turns on the Delicious Tags under search result links by default. Still not sure if we’ll have this on by default in the final version but we’ve made it so easy to turn off it seems like it’s a reasonable thing to do. Many thanks to Les Orchard, Mozilla Hacker and author of Hacking del.icio.us for some timely tactical advice while implementing this feature.

Some good news. Lazarus Form Recovery, our little side project, has risen through the ranks and joined Interclue on the AMO “recommended list” - probably the highest accolade available in the world of browser add-ons, apart from perhaps a glowing review in the Mossberg column, as our colleagues at Surf Canyon recently achieved.

The AMO directory (addons.mozilla.org) is linked directly from the Firefox Tools|Add-ons menu, and add-ons from the recommended list are even featured within the browser itself, so the 30-40 add-ons on that list do get a lot of exposure, and having two in there at once really is a great honor, given how many they have to choose from.

We’ve been asked a few times how we managed it. The short version is in both cases we wrote to Mozilla and explained how our addon met their criteria for recommendation, which you can read at the bottom of this page, and not long after that they were recommended. So it’s really about having the right sort of add-on and the right sort of reviews, rather than doing much in the way of lobbying or cajoling.

We put a lot of effort into making Lazarus almost flawless. It took a while longer to get right than we expected, there are a bunch of edge cases where form recovery is hard, but we felt it was worth chasing them all down so we could honestly say “Never lose anything you type into a web form again”.

Part of the Interclue Manifesto says “We will never stop looking for more ways to increase the value of the time people spend online.”, and certainly being able to recover hours of typing that otherwise would have been lost has increased the value of my time online, and from the ecstatic reactions we’ve gotten from Lazarus users, we’d say we haven’t strayed too far from our core mission.

Here are some snippets from Lazarus reviews on AMO:

I guess that means they like it :-)

It’s also gotten good feedback from tech bloggers who picked up on it. Not a lot of mainstream attention so far, probably because we haven’t contacted any of them, but hopefully that will come with time. Hey Walt, about that column of yours….

Interclue 1.5.8 introduces a few new features, fixes bugs, and adds compatibility with Firefox 3.1 beta 2.

See the changelog for more details.

We would like to thank the team at PDFMeNot.com for allowing us to tap into their excellent service, and everyone who has given us feedback recently - sorry if we couldn’t get your suggestions into this version, but the next version isn’t far away - and especially anyone who’s left a nice review on addons.mozilla.org or mentioned us on their blog. Special thanks to psidre for recent suggestions and moral support!

New features:

• PDF links now have a preview, thanks to the awesome PDFMeNot.com
• Bookmark Linkclue indicates if you have bookmarked a link
• Bookmark Metaclue shows the date you bookmarked a link
• You can now submit a screenshot when filing bug reports

Some recent user feedback:

“I am about to remove this application… I feel that the level of engineering in
the solution far exceeds the problem the solution is trying to solve”

My reply:

“Interclue is trying to solve a lot of problems in the long run. But if all you want is to do is say, preview a bunch of links on Google searches, I would recommend Coolpreviews. I do not, however recommend turning on the Coolpreviews switches that prefetch all the links on the page, or activate the addon for all sites (it only works on about 50 sites by default), for if you do it’ll inevitably lead to mayhem - Interclue is designed to work on any page, so we built in a lot of precautions to prevent fetching the wrong links (some of which take actions that are unwanted), or taking up too much bandwidth (a killer if you pay by the meg as many do outside America), and built in a lot of logic to give a useful tooltip on a wide variety of links, and to create tooltips that don’t cover the entire page. This leads to the level of overengineering you’re concerned about. We are planning to make Interclue easier to use, and with a simpler core set of functionality, but previewing on it’s own is a very complicated problem, and simple solutions will never work outside of a narrow range of situations (eg, search engines and directory pages, which is what Coolpreviews works well on, when the user has a fast connection and is not paying by the meg)”

I probably should have also mentioned: If you want a “cleaner” Interclue experience, try opening up the options and turning off all the metaclues and any buttons you’re not using (and yes, you can even turn off the one that leads to the Interclue donation page).

In future builds we will certainly be cutting down the number of options that are turned on by default…many users do appear to be turned off by all the stuff we’ve got turned on ;-)