KwiClick - Complete Tasks Quicker

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.