As mentioned, our latest release came out a bit ahead of schedule because we needed to fix the problem with Firefox 2.0.0.12. This meant we didn’t get to give it as much testing as we normally give to new releases. So there have been a couple of small issues that have been causing small amounts of grief.

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.

Todays big news is the release of version 1.5.2 - it’s out a little bit sooner than we intended, and without many new features, because, as many of you will have noticed, after installing Firefox 2.0.0.12, the Interclue Options Dialog suddenly stopped working!

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

It’s taken longer than we’d hoped, but the 2nd Interclue 1.5 beta is ready. We ‘re hoping to do a production 1.5 release as soon as possible, so let us know soon if you find any bugs, performance, or usability issues! New features will probably have to wait until the next point release at this stage.

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.

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.