Good news! Fleck has been awarded with the 100% CLEAN Award by SoftPedia. This means that actual people at SoftPedia have downloaded, installed and checked our software and made sure that it contains no malware, virusses or other malicious code.

If you didn’t trust us before this might be just what you were waiting for!

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 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.

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.

Since we launched the website and Firefox version in New York on the 16th we have been working on the Internet Explorer version of Fleck. A lot of people have emailed me asking when it would be available and why it is taking so long. I thought I’d explain a bit how this works.

Internet Explorer isn’t that different from Firefox but it does differ in a number of important ways. One thing that makes it very hard to develop for Explorer is that Javascript is very poorly supported and that error feedback is limited.

In  Firefox we get a clear error when something goes wrong with a hint of where the error might be. Explorer just gives up, crashes or just sits there doing nothing.

The good news is that we don’t actually have to rewrite everything. We just have to adapt our code to Explorer. This isn’t rocket science but tedious and detailed work which always takes longer than you think. So Arjen is currently coding, reloading and restarting Explorer a lot.

If you want to see how far he is you can download the Explorer extension and give it a try. Or use the “Fleck the Web” from on our frontpage.

Comments and suggestions are always welcome!