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