When I heard that Arjen was working on a new version of the Fleck logo I couldn’t help but worry. I like the old logo a lot and wasn’t ready to say goodbye to it. But this morning Arjen showed me what he did and I was just very happy!

He took the old logo and upgraded it with just a very subtle shade of grey in the white area. This is a very nice improvement and it just shows that to improve things you don’t necessarily have to throw out all the old stuff.

The new logo is also less pink and more red. This gives it a slightly more serious feel.

My favorite changes are incremental changes.

This is the ‘old’ Fleck logo:

And this is the updated Fleck logo:

What do YOU think?

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/

A few days ago we found out about the AddressBook Widget from Plaxo. It is a beautiful solution for a nagging problem most start-ups face. If you ever have had to enter your friends addresses in yet another To field you will understand what I mean.

Instead of asking your users to copy/paste their complete addressbook into your website addressbook you can now integrate the Plaxo AddressBook Widget into your service.

Adding the tool took mere minutes. Testing it to make sure it worked on every browser and site took a bit longer. But we didn’t find any inconsistencies and we happily launched this new feature yesterday.

This is how it works: when youw ant to share a flecked page with someone instead of entering their emailaddress from memory or looking it up and copy/pasting it you simply click the Plaxo button in the Share window up pops a window. As you can see in the image here you will be able to select your addressbook from a number of supported services.

Then it is just a matter of selecting the person you want to share this fleck with and clicking ‘Done’. The address will be pasted in the To field and that all there is to it.

We have been using this service for a few days now and we started seeing the added benefit right away. It is now much easier to email people and I noticed that I have been doing that even more than before. Why don’t you give it a try yourself…