You might have noticed our relentless weekly updates have gone quiet for a bit. That doesn’t mean Karl has stopped coding. In fact the improvements in our upcoming version are so significant we’re going to jump version numbers and call it “Interclue 1.5″

But first, we’re going to ask you to try out a beta version and let us know what you think. We’ve made some pretty significant changes and we’d really appreciate some feedback.

You can download the beta version from here. We will update it a few times with your suggested changes, and then in a week or two we’ll release 1.5 and it will go back to updating from the main download site again. Your chosen options will remain intact, but we’re interested in tweaking some of the defaults. Suggestions welcome.

The biggest improvement in 1.5 is the option to include images in your page summaries. In some cases a picture really is worth a thousand words. There is a new clueviewer button that allows you to switch back and forth between showing pictures and not. You can also change the minimum size of images to include in your summary, how small to shrink them down to, and so on.

The second biggest improvement is to our options dialog. There are now just over 100 different options in Interclue, and it has to be said that it was getting a little hard to find some of them. We recently introduced the ability to set the most important options by answering 3 simple questions on the presets tab, but often people have asked us for something that was already available in the advanced options, but not easy to find. This redesign groups the options more clearly by functional role.

If you read through the new options panels and see something that you don’t understand, do let us know so that we can improve the help text. If you see something that you think has the wrong default value, or is in the wrong place, then we’re interested to hear about that too. By the way, if you want to reset your options to the defaults, check out the “reset” panel on the advanced tab, and that will set it to whatever the current set of defaults is for new users.

Inside the next month we will make it possible to transfer your options between machines, for the sake of people not wanting to have to tweak them over and over again.

I’ll discuss some more of the other improvements that we’ve made tomorrow, for now, please do try the beta and let us know what you think.

There have been serveral short outages of the interclue.com website over the last month due to a sporadic hardware failure on our webserver. The technicians will be replacing the chassis (ie, everything apart from the hard drive) at 5pm NZ time today. During this time the website will not be available and you will be unable to use the Interclue Feedback Reporter built into the addon.

Also, we have discovered that for an unknown length of time during 4-14th October, the back-end for the Interclue Feedback Wizard was malfunctioning - reporting that it had received the report, but failing to submit it into our ticket system, or write it to disk, which was the failsafe we had in place.

If you used the feedback reporter last week, and haven’t heard back from us, we would be very grateful if you could resubmit your report, and our most sincere apologies for this slip-up. We have added another failsafe to the system, and we won’t let this happen again!

In other news, we’ve been hard at work on a significant new release, and I will be announcing the new features in our 1.5 beta soon after the webserver is back up and running.

Radio New Zealand National is one of oldest and most respected radio channels in New Zealand. Colin Jackson is one of the oldest and most respected[1] internet geeks in New Zealand, and he does their “New Technology” spot just before lunch on Thursdays. It’s a good listen for anyone interested in well, new technology, and it’s often got something for the geeks as well as the more mainstream radio audience. For instance, in his show about Firefox today, I learned that Internet Explorer was originally based on the Mosaic codebase, because Microsoft didn’t have time to write their own after they suddenly realized that the Internet wasn’t going away and Marc Andreessen’s Netscape was a serious strategic threat.

Colin often talks about the state of the Internet, or Open Source stuff. Firefox, therefore, sits squarely in his domain, and he offers a well informed perspective, although he does simplify a bit in places (the story of Mozilla and Firefox takes a long time to tell with any detail!) He mentions the wide array of addons as being a primary Firefox selling point, which is certainly true. He also recommends Interclue as a great Kiwi made addon. We’d have to agree. ;-)

[1] He launched the first .govt server, and recently was president of InternetNZ.