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 ;-)

Just in time for Firefox 3 Download Day, Interclue Ltd releases version 1.5.6 of it’s flagship browser addon, with full Firefox 3 support, new warnings for links to malware and phishing sites, a more compact and usable status bar menu, and many other improvements over the previous release, which was installed by over 120,000 Firefox users, fully one third of them using pre-release versions of Firefox 3, thus ensuring that Interclue and Firefox 3 are a well proven combination for faster and more productive web-surfing.

New Features in 1.5.6

• Potential “Phishing” Site Warnings
• Potential Malware Distribution Site Warnings (Firefox 3 only)
• Auto-correction of (some) broken link URLs: (e.g. http://http://stuff.com is converted to http://stuff.com)

Tweaks:

• Interclue status bar menu is now more compact and easier to use.
• Further improvements in the Linkclue positioning logic. In Firefox 3, it’s almost perfect. In Firefox 2 there are still one or two sites where the Linkclue icons will appear somewhere odd after you mouseover the link.
• Reduced excess whitespace appearing in some summaries.
• The TurboNote+ button will now be enabled by default if TurboNote+ is installed.
• Improved summaries for links to video.google.com
• Pinned-mode activation hotkey now off by default - most people don’t use it and it was irritating when activated accidentaly.

Bug Fixes:

• The Zoom bug got fixed in Firefox 3rc2+. Users with Firefox 3rc2+ should be able to use previews on zoomed pages again.
• Fixed previews for washingtonpost.com (their server responds with unusual content-type, which we now look for)
• Fixed a problem with “403: Forbidden” error messages being cached.

Interclue 1.5.5 is an incremental release with only a few minor interface improvements and bug fixes.

New Feature:

• Interclue now makes a backup of known good preferences to avoid preference corruption.

Tweaks:

• Added links to the online tour at the end of the tutorial
• Made feedback dialog more user friendly for users with small screens
• Made some changes to the “Show Next Similar Link” algorithm

Bug Fixes:

• Fixed a bug where certain Clueviews would disable the bookmark and open-in-new-tab icons
• Corrected a spelling mistake in the tutorial
• (Hopefully) Fixes a bug several people reported in which the “Thank you for installing” page appeared many times over. (See here for details.)
• Fixed a bug where a link to a secure domain that didn’t exist shows no clues
• Fixed a compatibility issue with the latest FF3 Nightly version.

Known Issue:

• The clueviewer may break zoomed pages in Firefox 3. As a temporary workaround, on sites where you have used the page-zoom feature, we recommend that you left-click the Interclue icon in your statusbar and select “Disable Interclue for this Site”. This bug appears to be with Firefox rather than Interclue, we have reported it, and we hope that it will be resolved before the final FF3.0 release.

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.