Interclue 1.5.4 is now available from addons.mozilla.org

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

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.

Version 1.2.1.4173 — July 13, 2007 — 377 KB

New features:

• We added a “copy to clipboard” button. There’s actually a limit on how much content we can copy into an email, but that doesn’t apply to the clipboard.
• When you do a search in any of the three major engines, search words are highlighted in the Clueview.

Tweaks

• We renamed Locked Mode to Pinned Mode. It’s still not quite the right metaphor, but at least it matches the icon now!
• When you tap the hotkey now, the clueviewer appears near the icon rather than near the mouse - particularly with things like search results, this means you don’t have to reposition the Clueviewer quite so often when moving between links in Pinned mode.
• When the clueviewer is visible you can now tap the hotkey to enter Pinned mode. The Clueviewer changes colour to green. Tap the hotkey again to close the Clueviewer.
• We reduced the size of the clue cache, and put a new setting into the performance tweaks pane to give more control over it.

Bugfixes

• Fewer pages now fail to summarize due to unexpected errors in the HTML layout.
• Some obscure and tenacious bugs that caused serious problems on only a few pages were eliminated.
• We also fixed a problem with scripted flash elements, eg - in Google analytics - thanks very much to Ionut of Google Operating System for reporting those issues. He also gave Interclue a great review, you can see it here.

Version 1.2.0.4112 — July 2, 2007 — 346 KB

All users should update as soon as possible to take advantage of the bugfixes and new features in 1.2.0 - if you are using Firefox 2.0 this update should have happened automatically, and all subsequent updates will be from the secure download site at addons.mozilla.org

New Features

• The Clueviewer now locks open if hotkey held down for more than a second, and unlocks the next time the hotkey is pressed. Definitely easier than holding the hotkey down to move through a bunch of links.
• We made some significant changes to the linkclue positioning code, eliminating all known cases where linkclues were showing up in the wrong place relative to the link.
• Changes to tutorial and options menus.
• We added “print” to the list of available clueview buttons. (feature is in beta, please let us know if it doesn’t work for you).

Change to Linkclue Mode Names

We have renamed the Linkclue modes to make it more obvious what they actually mean.

“Hotkey only for navigation links” means that content on the same site is only fetched for links that are probably articles rather than the directory or menu pages. However you can clueview these pages by holding down the Interclue hotkey (ctrl by default), so to be as transparent as possible we renamed the mode.

The arcane methods we use to detect site navigation links are now tweakable, and we have provided a shortcut item on the status bar linkclue mode menu to those rules.

By default for secure (https) pages, interclue is disabled. However most users will probably find it more useful to switch to “hotkey only for all internal links” so that content external to the site can be clueviewed.

you can change the default linkclue modes for http and https on the options screen accessed from the top item on this menu.

Bugfixes

• Removed bogus html caused by doubleclick ads.
• Eliminated all known cases where linkclue icons were appearing in the wrong place.
• Interclue no longer fetches any content if Linkclue icons not shown (this fixes the Bloglines bug)

If you are enjoying using Interclue we’d be very keen for more reviews on addons.mozilla.org - you may need to register first.

Interclue is live on addons.mozilla.org

Interclue went live to the public on a.m.o for the first time this weekend and has had over 2000 downloads from there in the first few days. That puts us into the top 10% of firefox addons by weekly download count.

Our official download/install page for Firefox is now https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4999 and future updates will also be made from that location.

Initial reviews posted by the Mozilla community during the “sandbox” review process were highly encouraging, and no doubt contributed to our download count. Here are a few we’re particularly proud of:

This one is a keeper!
by Max BBT on June 21, 2007 (rated 10)
I have to agree with the reviews below - pain free and very useful. Installed on Vista (v.1.1.1, now 1.1.2.4064). Had Cooliris before that but Interclue gives a lot more useful info as others have mentioned already, has more options and so far i have no problems, smooth. Have to add that support is excellent too - the author(-s) is responsive and a pleasure to deal with. Never thought i’d be interested in this kind of extension but suddenly i see this one as a keeper along with my everyday/version/profile standbys. Good job!

Way better than expected
by Danforth on June 20, 2007 (rated 9)
I’d tried CoolIris and uninstalled it pretty quickly, couldn’t live with it. I expected Interclue to be as awkward in its own way, but I can see where the work has gone in on the UI and added-value. Definitely a keeper. Best features: Its ability to get at the important page content so reliably from a range of sites and pages. No resources spent on hints for navigation links. Would like to see: Faster preview fetching, always. But it’s pretty good already. I’m using 1.1.2. It installed seamlessly and works fine on my Firefox 2.0.0.4/XP.

Works as advertised!
by Vyper on June 20, 2007 (rated 10)
I was using a different preview addon until I discovered this one. For what I do, I don’t need to see what a page I’m previewing looks like. I need to know it’s content. This addon does that beautifully with a bucketful of options and information you can include or exclude. If you use any preview addon, give this one a look.

Linkclue Positioning Issue in 1.1.2

We are aware of an issue regarding the placement of Linkclues on some pages in the new 1.1.2 release, and expect to have this resolved in the next version, which will be posted as an update for all existing users.

Hi all,

There’s been some nice buzz about Interclue around the blogosphere and in our feedback systems - you can read some of the highlights over here. Particular thanks to Demogirl who made a screencast of Interclue in action, something I’ve been working on myself, and it’s harder than it looks!

Some more good news: Tomorrow morning (New Zealand Time, ~14hrs from now) we’ll make available the upgrade to the 1.02 release, which fixes almost all the bugs reported thus far (mercifully there haven’t been a lot of them!) - most importantly the “noscript conflict” and the “frames bug” that was causing problems with gmail and some other sites. Mucho thanks to everyone who reported bugs via our Google Group or via the built in interface - at the moment we’re happy for you to use either form of feedback, but as time goes on we’d prefer that you use the built in system for specific issues, we’ve made it very easy to submit the appropriate details.

BTW: Anyone who installs from our website from now on will get the new version.

Cheers,
Seth.

We made a few last minute website tweaks this morning, but now we’re good to go. Looking forward to everyone’s feedback over at the Interclue forum. Visiting tech media or bloggers please see the news page.

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.