KwiClick - Complete Tasks Quicker

Over the last year (2009) we’ve received literally thousands of suggestions and pieces of feedback on how to make KwiClick a little bit more personal and easier to use.  One of the most requested items was Site Specific Search; the ability to use KwiClick on any site that you want.  We’ve observed a number of techniques that other addons and services have taken to address this type of functionality and are extremely excited to introduce, what we think is, the easiest and most straight-forward way to search any particular site on the web.  Over the next few weeks we’re going to introduce our version of the Site Specific Search tied directly inside of KwiClick.  You wont have to worry about finding a particular search box on your favorite site(s), or enter any long string of characters… In fact, with just about one single click you’ll be able to instantly search a site (and see the results inside KwiClick) and save that site in KwiClick for later searching whenever you like.

We’re very excited about this development and as we update KwiClick, we’d love to hear your feedback.  Site Specific Searching is just another chip off the iceberg that we’re planning for 2010.  Stay tuned as we have lots more in store!

From the vault of our lead architect Rich: For the latest version of KwiClick we introduced a feature called search clovers. When you highlight a word on a page, a single diamond shaped “clover” appears. When you hover over the diamond, 3 more diamonds appear creating a 4 leaf clover configuration. To create these diamonds we use two html tags, an img surrounded by a div. In Firefox versions prior to 3.5 we used a background image on the div to create the look of a the diamond. The corners of the images overlapped each other causing problems when a user tried to hover or click on one of them.

With Firefox 3.5 we were able to fix this by creating the diamond using only html and some specialized css tags. Using the tags: -moz-transform, -moz-border-radius, and -moz-box-shadow we rotate the div 45 degrees and add a shadow to them.

  display: inline-block !important;
  border: 2px solid #494949 !important;
  background: none !important;
  background-color: white !important;
  -moz-transform: rotate(45deg) !important;
  -moz-border-radius: 4px !important;
  -moz-box-shadow: grey 2px 2px 2px !important;

This also rotates the content within the div. To fix that we rotate the image back 45 degrees.

  -moz-transform: rotate(-45deg) !important;

And viola, a diamond with all the html event goodness, made with only html and css. Safari and Chrome support these transforms with -webkit-transform so this same effect can be used there.

Earlier this week we rolled out a significant update for KwiClick. This update introduces a number of new items and quite a few fixes. Lets dig into each one:

Search Clovers - One of the main goals here at KwiClick is to make it as easy as possible to perform searches whenever you need to, and however you want to. A popular way of performing a search is to highlight some text on a webpage, copy and paste that into the browser search box and get the results. The Search Clovers make this a bit easier. When you highlight some text, you’ll now see a small semi-transparent icon appear above that text. This icon shows the Google logo, and when you click it, the search will open inside the KwiClick panel. Additionally, if you hover over this icon you will see three more icons appear in a clover formation; hence the name Search Clovers. We’ve loaded these clovers with Google, Wikipedia, Google Maps, and twitter; but you can easily re-assign them to your favorite services that we support (19 and counting as of this post). We’ve got some interesting bells and whistles built in here that you can play around with such as: changing the delay before you see the first clover, adjusting the transparency of the clover, tweaking the time before the other clovers disappear, the minimum number of highlighted characters before the clover appears, the animation speed of the clovers, and opening the clovers above or below the selected text. These clovers are pretty intelligent because they know where the selected text is on the page. If you highlight some text that is all the way on the right side of the page, the clovers will know to open slightly to the left so that they don’t appear off the page. If the highlighted text is on the very top of the page, the clovers will know to open below the text. This type of searching has been called ’selection based searching’ and we think you’ll love the way we’ve done it. Please do feel free to give us more ideas on improving this nifty little feature.

Updated Bing Provider - We’re now fully supporting Bing so all you Bing lovers can start using this immediately. (this can also be assigned as a Search Clover).

Updated compatibility for Firefox 3.6beta- Mozilla is preparing an amazing update to the Firefox browser and we’re ready for it. KwiClick is fully compliant with the latest betas.

Trim leading and trailing spaces from searches to improve accuracy- Sometimes a search may produce different results if there is a space before the search query or after it. We’ve implemented a way to remove these spaces so that the results are a bit more accurate. This one was requested a bit by you guys.

Updated kwiclick skin- You may not notice it, but we’ve shaved a few pixels off the KwiClick panel to make it look and feel a little bit sharper. We’ve got more in store for this stuff so stay tuned.

Updated wikipedia provider- When we first rolled out Wikipedia support in KwiClick we had some issues with the accuracy of the results. I’m happy to report that we’ve taken care of those issues. Wikipedia results should come back quicker and if there is an exact match for an article, you’ll be taken directly to that page.

We’ve got a lot more in store and love hearing your feedback. Most of the items I’ve mentioned above are the direct result of users sending in what they love (and hate) about KwiClick.

With the most recent update of KwiClick (v2.3.2) we have included the ability to post videos directly into your Facebook news feed. We wanted to hear your thoughts on this, and if we’ve left anything out that you feel would be valuable to you. This feature currently works across all the video providers we support (YouTube, Vimeo, Viddler, HowCast, LiveVideo, Veoh, blip.tv). In order for this feature to work, each user first needs to connect KwiClick to their Facebook profile and grant some ’stream publishing’ permissions. This allows KwiClick to actually embed the videos to your wall. We’ve gone through a number of different design iterations to make sure this process is smooth, and easy to understand. If you have any suggestions on how to make this even easier, we would love to hear about them.

We are working on some more significant updates to enhance the flow of searching within a webpage, and the ability to create your own search providers without requiring you to write any bits of code, or even specify any urls or query commands. We think you guys will love it. Stay tuned as we’ve got a lot more in store.
Join our Facebook group
Follow us on twitter.
Thanks for all the great feedback and please keep on sending it in.

We’ve released a significant update to KwiClick that adds quite a bit under the hood, as well as some pretty nifty new features you can play with.  Here’s a quick list of some of the updates:

* Facebook status provider
* Status message customization
* BlipTv video provider
* jQuery integration
* Reworked error page
* Other Google Ajax searches
* Preference window size based on locale
* FireGestures integration in the main window

Lets go through each one of these.

Facebook status provider - You can now post videos and images directly into your Facebook profile/stream from any video or image provider we support.  This is what it boils down to: if you’re browsing around the web and see a video that you’d like to share with friends on Facebook, you can simply “favorite” that video, and it will automagically post to Facebook.  This works for all the video providers we support: Youtube, Veoh, Vimeo, Howcast, LiveVideo, blip.tv, and Viddler.  Just look for the star icon above each video.  This also works for videos you discover inside of KwiClick as well.  Once you link up your Facebook account to KwiClick, the process is just a single click!  Just hit the star icon (more Facebook goodness coming soon!).  We’ll be posting a video to walk through this over the next couple of days.

Status message customization - Now you can enter a message that gets sent along to Facebook and/or Twitter when you post videos/images.  If you want, you can post videos to Facebook and Twitter at the same time.  It’s slick and very easy to use.

BlipTv video provider - We’re big fans of blip.tv and now you can enjoy their videos from inside KwiClick as well!  You can also browse their most popular, most recent, and random videos as well.

jQuery integration - A top secret project is in the works and jQuery will help us make the magic happen.  It’s going to be used for some slick stuff.

Reworked error page - Before today, if you searched for something in KwiClick that didn’t have any search results, you ended up looking at a pretty bland message telling you ‘no results were found’.  With this update, we give you a few more options to help you find what you are looking for; things such as running the search on the providers site, reviewing your historical searches, etc.  It’s not the absolute best way of handling no results, but it’s a step in the right direction.  We’ll keep plugging away on improving the usability of the ‘no results page’.

Other Google Ajax searches - We received a number of suggestions that we should add in more types of Google searches, like Image Search, Blog Search, etc.  So, we’ve added in Image, Blog, News, Patent, and Book searches.  We’re still working on linking these up with the Firefox search box, and that is coming shortly as well.

Preference window size based on locale - For non English speaking users, this update will help make sure the preference windows are the appropriate size so that everything fits handy dandy.

Firegesture integration in the main window - One of the easiest ways to search something using KwiClick is to highlight something on a page and use a mouse gesture to run the search inside KwiClick.  Now you can perform all sorts of gestures inside the KwiClick panel itself.  Gestures such as: go back/forward in history, next/previous page of results, scroll to top/bottom, open links in new windows/tabs/background tabs/copy to clipboard, and many more.  You can use wheel gestures, rocker gestures and both mouse button gestures.  If your running the latest version of FireGestures, this will be super easy to setup.

We’re really excited to share these updates with you, and hope that you’ll continue to give us feedback and suggestions on what you’d like to see from KwiClick.

To get the latest version, head on over to the KwiClick addon page at Mozilla.org.

As we surf around the web each day, certain tasks come to us naturally.  Typing in your most frequented websites seems to be a bit easier than typing a new domain.  Moving your mouse into the top right corner to close a screen is almost second nature to most of us.  It is easier for your mind to send a signal down your wrist and have you drag your mouse a certain way than to have your eyes direct you to a link which your mouse then moves to and clicks.  We feel that this is a fundamentally more efficient way to complete some of your daily tasks.

We’re excited to show you what we’ve got in the works.  There’s going to be some interesting new ways to navigate in and around KwiClick that you might find more efficient than before.  Stay tuned…

We’re excited to announce that we’ve rolled out another update to KwiClick, adding a number of requested features and putting some more polish in. There’s quite a few items that have been updated, and I’ll briefly go through some of the bigger updates here. We’ve been working on this build for quite some time, and would love to hear your feedback and suggestions.

AlwaysRaised Issue on Mac: This one has been driving us crazy for a while.  The Mac/Linux versions of KwiClick were not behaving the same way as the Windows version, so we dug in, figured out why, and resolved the issue of the KwiClick panel hiding itself.  Mac users, I think you’ll appreciate this one.

Turn on/off animations: We did receive some reports that the window animations ran a bit slow on some older computers, so we decided to put in an option to turn these animations off, if you prefer.

Turn on/off auto-hide: Some people like the way KwiClick hides itself, while others prefer to keep the KwiClick window open, and close it when they want to.  We tossed in a little option to do just this.

Status Provider: This is a new feature that lets you send updates to Twitter (with support for additional services currently under development) when you “favorite” a video, image, map, or link.  It’s a nifty way to share links with your friends on your preferred networks.  We’ve built this feature using the Twitter API, so you wont be redirected to a twitter.com page to enter info.  All the magic happens inside of KwiClick itself.  For now you’ll be able to tweet that you found a video, image, map, or link.  In the future we’ll be adding a lot more tweaks to let you customize your messages, etc.

Updated Preferences: We’ve reworked our preference/options window a bit for better usability, with “help” links in case you need them.

Results Language Selector: You can now choose which language you would like your results to appear in.

Favorites Provider: Sometimes I find an interesting video and wish I could save just that video as a bookmark, but not the entire page. This is what the Favorites Provider does; and also works for flickr images, google maps, and links found inside KwiClick.  We’ve integrated with the Firefox bookmarks manager to make an easy way to organize videos and stuff.  We’ve got a lot planned for this one, so keep an eye out for interesting ways to interact witht the content you add into the Favorites Provider.

Updated Theme Work: We’re continuing our theme work to make sure KwiClick does not conflict with Firefox themes in not-so-cool ways.  Still more work to be done here, including the possibility of our own theme engine sometime in the not too distant future.

Send, Share, and Add Favorite Actions: KwiClick lets you interact with search results in some pretty interesting ways.  You can open links in background tabs, new windows, and so on.  Thats all fine and dandy, but we wanted to add some new ways to interact with links.  So, now you can quickly send links, or share them on various social networks just by clicking on them.  Want to send a link you found in Google directly to twitter? Do it with a single click of the mouse.

Additional Private Browsing Mode Support: Once you switch into Private Browsing Mode in Firefox, none of your KwiClick tracks are left behind.  We made sure to clear out your entire history, to keep everything squeaky clean.

More Language Support: Thanks to the help of translators, KwiClick is available in over 10 languages! Super!

Keyboard Shortcut: On Windows hit CTRL+SHIFT+K.  On Macs hit COMMAND+SHIFT+K.  Voila!

Please do keep sending the feedback, whether directly to us on twitter, or through our support forums.  It really does help us define our roadmap and what you guys think is important for us to work on.  We’ve got a lot of interesting projects under development and can’t wait to share them with you all.  We promise to continue making your search experience more efficient.

Go get the latest version of KwiClick.

We’ll be heading down to the Future of Web Apps conference in Miami Florida on Feb 23rd.  The event has a solid lineup of workshops and speakers, so if you can make it, we would highly recommend it.  We’ll be giving some demos of the new version of KwiClick coming out soon.  If you’d like to see a sneak preview, let us know in the comments here or drop us a line on twitter: @kwiclick.

Some of the speakers will include:

Alex Hunter from Virgin
Aza Raskin from Mozilla
Ben Galbraith from Mozilla
Chris Messina from Vidoop
Dan Theurer from Yahoo
Daniel Burka from Digg & Pownce
Dave Morin from Facebook
Dave McClure from Founders Fund
David Recordon from SixApart
Dion Almaer from Google
Francisco Tolmasky from 280 North
Gary Vaynerchuk from Wine Library TV
Jason Fried from 37Signals
Jenny Ambrozek from SageNet LLC
Joe Stump from digg
Joel Spolsky from Joel on Software

A number of people have asked us how to setup mouse gestures for KwiClick so we decided to create a short tutorial on exactly this. The video below walks you through each step. Have we left anything out? Let us know and please do continue to send us your feedback.

Firefox has a vibrant community of developers that are constantly releasing new tools and tweaks to make your browser experience more and more enjoyable. We knew right away that using mouse gestures with KwiClick would increase it’s ease of use, and make a user’s experience using KwiClick more enjoyable. So, rather than reinventing the wheel and building our own gesture engine, we decided to integrate with existing mouse gesture addons, FireGestures being the first. We’ve already released an update to integrate with the popular NoScript addon, to help users decide which types of content they want to give permission to view inside KwiClick.

There are pros and cons to either approach. On the pro side, it helps us keep our addon a bit lighter weight as we only need to write the code to integrate with the other addon, rather than write all the code to mimic an addons specific functionality. On the cons side, if a user doesn’t have the addon that we are integrating with, they may not get the full experience that we are trying to provide to everyone. We’re going to be keeping a close eye on this over the coming months, and it would be great to hear your feedback on our approach.