Hi all,

There’s been some nice buzz about Interclue around the blogosphere and in our feedback systems - you can read some of the highlights over here. Particular thanks to Demogirl who made a screencast of Interclue in action, something I’ve been working on myself, and it’s harder than it looks!

Some more good news: Tomorrow morning (New Zealand Time, ~14hrs from now) we’ll make available the upgrade to the 1.02 release, which fixes almost all the bugs reported thus far (mercifully there haven’t been a lot of them!) - most importantly the “noscript conflict” and the “frames bug” that was causing problems with gmail and some other sites. Mucho thanks to everyone who reported bugs via our Google Group or via the built in interface - at the moment we’re happy for you to use either form of feedback, but as time goes on we’d prefer that you use the built in system for specific issues, we’ve made it very easy to submit the appropriate details.

BTW: Anyone who installs from our website from now on will get the new version.

Cheers,
Seth.

Richard MacManus, a fellow Kiwi, wrote about Interclue today on ReadWriteWeb. Richard has done an awesome job of building up a solid new media business with ReadWriteWeb, with a reputation for solid analysis of web 2.0 trends, sites and applications. His web traffic compares favourably with major NZ web portals like Stuff and Xtra - but only a small fraction of it comes from inside New Zealand. In a way, you could say he’s a major exporter!

Richard’s writeup of Interclue covered the main points well, but if you’ve got a favourite feature you’d like to mention, a site you’ve found it works really well on, or you’ve compared us with one of the Interclue competitors he mentions, why not make a comment in the relevant comment section? It’s a good reference point and one spot where a lot of people will first find out about Interclue.

I’ll blog more about the comparison between Interclue and the products he mentions later. There’s a handy reference chart in our Press Kit for anyone who’s really interested in the nitty gritty.

I’ve only been trickling out the launch announcement so far, so not a huge number of installs yet, but what people see they seem to like. Here are some random bits of buzz:

“One of the best firefox addons I’ve used”

“Just grabbed interclue. Already handy in the first five minutes.”

“A lot of online abstract summaries have huge long lists of titles, and loading up each abstract in a tab is a bummer, and this looks like the best thing we’ve ever seen in getting through lots of text summaries like an abstract compilation.”

People seem to particularly like using Interclue on Wikipedia, on news sites, and inside their intranets.

Currently it doesn’t work well on Gmail - which is a particularly elaborate online application - and we will look into that. On the other hand it does work really well on Google Reader, and many other online feed readers. It’s really nice being able to read the content and context of a link without having to leave the page. If you haven’t tried google reader yet, you really should. It’s a great way to get all your incoming news in one place. Don’t forget to add the interclue blog feed by clicking one of our feed icons to the right.

Today we’ll upload Interclue to the sandbox on addons.mozilla.org, where we hope to get a lot of valuable feedback from the early adopters in the Mozilla community.

We made a few last minute website tweaks this morning, but now we’re good to go. Looking forward to everyone’s feedback over at the Interclue forum. Visiting tech media or bloggers please see the news page.

Blog comments are off for the moment while we debate whether to require a login first or let anyone leave comments if they’re willing to leave an email address. This seems to be something John and I can’t agree on. Personally I think we want all the comments we can get, but John thinks we can raise the quality of our comments by requiring a login. We’ll have a chat about it over on our google group, do join in there if you have an opinion one way or the other.

This is how it works: we post announcements about major releases, minor releases that fix important bugs, and the major milestones of our alpha and beta releases under the tag ‘news’. We also include tags for the platforms those announcements are relevant to.

You can read just the news, or even just the news as it relates to your preferred browser, by filtering the blog by tags. The same filters can apply to generating RSS or Atom feeds, so you can use those in your favourite feed reader to get just the news you’re interested in.

As a bonus, we’re also copying these news items to mailing lists hosted on Google Groups.

Links to the news, filtered by browser and available on the blog, via feeds or via email are available in the “News Feed” box in the blog sidebar.

How does the sign up form on the main site fit in? We figure that the people who use that form aren’t interested in wonky beta versions of the add-on, so we’ll email those addresses when a stable release is ready, and, at the same time, invite them to join the news list for their browser.

Well, the time has come to light the blue touchpaper. We’re going to ship.

We still haven’t finished the IE version, but we’re close enough that no one will beat us to it. We still haven’t finished the hosted summary server, that will take a little longer, but should be out sometime next month.

The Firefox version, after a beta test that went on a fair bit longer than expected, we’re feeling pretty confident about, so it’s past time to get it out there.

Hence we will take the covers off the website at 7am Wednesday 16th NZT, make a PR release, and start encouraging downloads.

So it would be great if you could kick the tyres a bit here and send us some feedback. And of course, download the addon and look for any subtle problems we’ve yet to pick up on. It still doesn’t work well on every web page, but it’s close enough that we’re comfortable releasing it to the public.

It would be great if you joined our new “interclue-users” google group by visiting

http://groups.google.com/group/interclue-user

and signing up there.

I decided we’d host our mailing lists on google groups because that’s where most of the user and developer discussion lists that I personally belong to are already, and I presume that goes for a lot of other people. I like being able to see all my GG subscriptions in one place and change the subscription mode so that I get emails as posts happen, in a digest, or never. I hope you’ll sign up and join us for the exciting public launch phase of Interclue and for the hopefully rapid improvements to come after that.

We’ve feature frozen the current version, but we’ll be releasing another beta not long after that, and a new mailing list for it. If you think of a new feature you want by all means tell us about it, but right now we’re mainly interested in:

1: Bugs
2: Install problems
3: Text & cosmetic improvements
4: Minor tweaks to existing features
5: Any thoughts on changes to default values
6: Suggestions of stuff that should go into our FAQ
7: Suggested improvements to the content on our website
8: Problems with any of the limited functionality on the website