Overengineered? Well, it depends on what you’re trying to achieve.

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 ;-)