A few moments ago I uploaded version 1.0 of the Fleck Firefox Add-on to the Mozilla Addons website.

We have tested the latest version for a while now and it seems to work very well. We hope you take a few moments to upgrade your version of Fleck and play around with it.

Download it now or use Firefox to update it automatically:

Click on Firefox Menu >> Tools >> Add-ons >> Find Updates

The new software will show you the amount of Annotated versions of each page you visit. Clicking the little Icon (pictured here) will open up the sidebar with a preview of each annotated page. Clicking it will open the page with Fleck notes.

Also see my previous post about this version.

We have been working on a new version of the Fleck Add-on for a while now. Before we could launch it we had to make some changes to the server side technology so that is why it took a while.

The new version not only works better then the old version. It is also the start of a new direction and function of Fleck. Right from the early days we wanted Fleck to become a new layer on the web which you could access always and everywhere. For that dream to become reality we needed more than just the technology to add notes to websites. We also need a way to signal people that there are actual Flecks on the page they are visiting.

The new Firefox Add-on does just that. It adds a small Fleck logo to your browser that displays the number of Flecks on any page you visit. We hope it will be a small and unobtrusive way to get you attention if there is something there which might be interesting for you.

As you can see in the illustration there are 3 different annotated versions of my Blog.

When you click the little icon a sidebar will open up showing you links and a preview to these annotated pages. At this moment we only show Flecked pages from registered Fleck member and only on that particular URL.

In the future we will add more information here such as Annotated pages from your friends and the number of Flecks on other pages in this domain.

We haven’t officially released the Add-on yet but I would like to ask a few of you to download it and give us some feedback. We are very interested how it works for you before we launch it to everyone.

Download the beta Fleck Add-On here.

We are considering to build some of the Fleck functionality in Flash. One of the reasons is that some content
on webpages floats above HTML and hides our notes and toolbar. Flash might be a solution.

The reason why we haven’t done this earlier is because I figured that not everybody uses Flash and the solution would be worse than the problem. But a few weeks ago someone pointed out to me that over 95% of the internet population now has some version of Flash installed.

I had to look that up at the Macromedia website becuase I just couldn’t believe it. But here it is: “Flash content reaches 98% of Internet viewers“.

According to Macromedia it is even 98.3% of all internet users.

That is why we are now looking into Flash as an alternative technology for our interface. If you know someone who would like to work on this with us, preferably in Amsterdam, then contact us.

You can download the new Fleck Firefox add-on from Mozilla now. We have made a few minor improvements to the code and one visually important improvement.

As you can see in the illustration here the Fleck Button grays out on pages that Fleck isn’t compatible with. For security reasons it just isn’t possible to Fleck pages on secure servers.

So when a URL starts with ‘https’ the button becomes inactive.

At this moment we are working on the 1.0 version of the Fleck Add-on which will introduce a few very cool new features. Until then, enjoy this new version!

If you have Fleck installed in Firefox just select ‘Add-ons’ in the ‘Tools’ menu and click the ‘Find updates’ button in the lower left corner. Fleck will automatically update itself.

Download Fleck Add-on for Firefox:
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/3908/

Fleck is about democracy so please let us know which features you would like to see first in Fleck. You can also add features yourself. I will move this poll to the sidebar later so it will stay there for a while as we continue to add features.

We are back from Paris and today we want to test a few new browsers with Fleck.

Flock
If you have Flock you can download the Fleck-Flock extension. Let us know how it works and what you see and what isn’t working for you.

Opera
Opera should be working fine at the end of the day. Robert noticed a problem with saving the notes which he is working on now but besides that it seems to work. We won’t offer an Extension for Opera yet but at least you will be able to use Fleck from Fleck.com or use the Bookmarklet.

Safari
I also received a few (several!) requests for Fleck on Safari. Safari gives us a lot of trouble with Javascript. I don’t know if we will be able to fix everything this week but it should work as soon as possible. I use a MacBook Pro myself and use both Firefox and Safari so please don’t think that Safari isn’t importan for us. I don’t even think that the fact that Safari has a smaller footprint in the browser market makes it less important. It isn’t important whether a lot of people use but which people use it. Are those people Bloggers, journalist and early adopters who would love to use Fleck? Then we need to offer Fleck on Safari.

Other browsers or platforms
If there are any browsers that we are forgetting please let us know in the comments here. We want to make Fleck as compatible as possible and if it isn’t working well in your browser we want to hear about it.