This is primarily a maintenance release to address issues arising from significant interface changes in Interclue 1.5.3. It also improves general usability, and adds compatibility with FireFox 3 beta5.

New Feature:

• New “Send to TurboNote” button for users with TurboNote+ installed.
  Turbonote is a superb shareware “sticky notes” program made by some friends of ours here in Christchurch, New Zealand. We highly recommend giving it a try if you are a Windows user.

Tweaks:

• Updated maxVersion to FF3.0b5
• Per domain security rules now apply to all pages in a domain *and* its subdomains
• The Clueviewer is no longer shown when hovering over Javascript Linkclue icons
• Added mimetype information for non HTML previews
• Changed defaults to no longer show warnings for all internal query strings, only “danger word” links
• Moved Note about internal navigation links to Linkscent menu rather than a first-use popup message

Bug Fixes:

• Images now resize back to normal when clicked
• Bookmarking now works with FF3.0b5
• Added some missing default preferences
• Workaround for 301/302 xmlHttpRequest redirect failure in 3b5
• Clicking the tutorial links before the tutorial was initalised broke the tutorial pages

Sporadic Problems when running under Firefox 3b3

We’ve had several reports now of sporadic freezes when Interclue is installed under Firefox 3 beta 3. We launched Interclue 1.5.2 around the same time Firefox 3b3 was released, and hadn’t done a lot of testing with it, so hadn’t seem this particular issue. It only seems to show up sporadically, and we’re not really sure Interclue is to blame, but if you unexpectedly see all the browser “chrome” lock up while the current page is still scrollable, that’s the bug we’re interested in, please email us at supportATinterclueDOTcom, or use the Interclue Feedback Reporter. We’re investigating the situation and will get back to you as soon as we’ve confirmed the real issue.

New Tutorial Doesn’t Explain Linkclue Modes Very Well

Also, we’ve noticed that in our desire to streamline the tutorial, we left out two important points about Linkclue Modes, and that has been causing a little confusion.

Firstly, the default mode for secure (https) sites is disabled , and you will need to change the Linkclue Mode using the Interclue Icon in the status bar to show Linkclues on secure sites (eg https://addons.mozilla.org).

Secondly, when the mode is”No Linkclues on Navigation Links” (gold icon), which is the default for non-secure sites, or “No Linkclues on Internal Links” (blue icon), you will often see the same yellow and blue Interclue icons appear next to the mouse cursor instead of next to the link. These special icons are not meant to be clickable, they are only there to tell you that the link in question is either a site navigation link (gold) or an internal link (blue).

“Internal” in this case means “any link on the same domain”, while “Navigation” links are Internal Links inside menues, where Linkclue Icons tend to get in the way. This is a pretty technical point, but in general it’s useful to have Linkclues on Internal links inside articles, but not on menus. So by default, Interclue is in “No Linkclues on Navigation Links” mode for non-secure sites.

This can be a bit confusing for many users, and we’re thinking about ways to streamline it and make it more intuitive in the next release.

After getting several reports about this, Karl located the problem, created a work-around, and submitted a bugzilla report to the Firefox team. A patch for the bug was posted *5 hours* later - pretty amazing response time, but of course the patch will not have any effect until a new version of Firefox is rolled out, so users of version 2.0.0.12 are urged to update Interclue as soon as possible. Here is the bugzilla ticket if anyone is interested:

There are also a few new linkclues, a bunch of improvements to the tutorial to make it simpler and faster, and a number of small tweaks and bugfixes to improve the all-around user experience.

New Features in 1.5.2

• Linkclues for non-HTTP protocols (ftp, gopher, aim, torrent, …)
• A new Metaclue: “Show Downloadable Files” (off by default)
• Option to be notified about new beta versions

Tweaks:

• Shortened the tutorial and made it faster
• Better Facebook summaries
• Firefox 3.0 beta 2 & beta 3 compatibility
• “Turn images on in summaries” on by default
• Disabling hotkeys by default
• Rearranged Clueviewer buttons
• Added “About” link to status bar context menu
• Removed Interclue footers from summaries copied to clipboard
• More strings are now internationalized properly
• Added OnUninstall feedback page
• Removed favicon prefetching because of redirect issue
• Various minor text changes
• Cleaned up old legacy code
• Removed legacy preferences from user prefs.js file
• Tidied up a few more obscure Linkclue positioning bugs

BugFixes:

• Workaround for Firefox 2.0.0.12 preventing our options dialog from opening
• Error was thrown if Linkclue mode changed before Clueviewer was built
• Incorrect stats were shown if browser was used past midnight
• The Buttons table in the options was not correctly striped
• Incorrect message was shown when attempting to view Clues for local files
• Error if a non-HTTP protocol link was Clued a second time
• Inserting Linkclue icons sometimes caused wrapped link to wrap differently
• Linkclue cursors could cause the page to resize if link was located at right or bottom of page
• Fixed a URL decoding error which prevented the Options dialog from opening if certain URLs had user-defined
  Linkclue modes attached to them
• Added detection for incorrect character encoding if invalid meta tag found in HTML

Changes since 1.5 Beta 1

• We’ve made significant enhancements to Pinned Mode, so you can now jump to the next link that’s like the one you’re on, rather than just the next link. There are pages like google search results where you want to jump to the next result, not the next link, and this trick takes care of that nicely. There’s also the option to pre-cache those links for increased speed.



These are the only arrows that should show up by default although the others are still available in the options (you may have noticed that in 1.5 the options button on the clueview jumps straight to the list of clueview buttons in the options).

• We revamped the Options Dialog again, aiming for even greater usability/findability.



• We’ve started using the Amazon API to show links to amazon products, rather than attempting to summarize the raw page, which was near impossible.
• We made a whole lot of bugfixes and usability tweaks.

We’d really appreciate it if you installed the 1.5 beta if you haven’t already, and let us know what you think. All existing beta users will be notified soon that there’s a new version available to upgrade to.

We’re hoping to generate a bit of publicity around the Interclue 1.5 launch, and as part of that we’re working on a new “User Endorsements” page, so if you are finding that Interclue is making you more productive, or making a particular site or search engine that much more useful to you, why not click here to give us your endorsement.

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.

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.

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.

New Features:

• We have implemented a ClueHistory! You will now see Back and Forward buttons in the ClueViewer.
• You can now ClueView *.mp3 and *.mov files inside the ClueViewer if Quicktime 7.2 or greater is installed.
• Added social bookmark buttons for Windows.live and Stumbleupon.

Tweaks:

• Added a link in the timeout message to the place where you can change the timeout setting.

BugFixes:

• Fixed an error that prevented the content from being displayed when showing the first clue after saving options.
• Removed some obscure clue rendering bugs.

• Fast, slow, or average reaction times
• Fast, slow, or average computers
• Fast, slow, or expensive internet connections

Several small interface improvements, performance enhancements and bugfixes are also included.

New Features:

• Added a new “Presets” option tab to allow for quick settings for common situations.
• New button: “open link in new foreground* tab” (ie change focus to the new tab immediately)
• Option to control when the link changes while you’re in pinned mode.

Tweaks

• Tweaked the tutorial.
• Wording changes in the feedback dialog and options tab.
• Moved most images into combined image files to speed up load time.

Bugfixes:

• Fixed a bug where favicons where not being pre-fetched correctly after pageload.
• (Hopefully) Fixed error preventing the options dialog from loading on Ubuntu Feisty
• Linkclues were not fading out without a mousemove.
• Bugzilla cluescript wasn’t showing product/component/severity if user logged in.
• Bugzilla cluescript now shows (edit) link in title if user logged in
• Loading clues reset video playing on a page if the page contained certain css rules.