30 November 2015

Clippings 5.0 beta 3 released -- testers wanted!

This is the third beta release of Clippings 5.0, intended for early adopter users who crave the latest and greatest. Users not comfortable trying out pre-release software and tolerating its inevitable bugs should stick with Clippings 4.1.2 for now.

If you already have a previous release of Clippings installed, you must uninstall it first before installing this release. Because this is a beta release, no automatic upgrades to this release will be available to current Clippings users.

What's New in Beta 3

Mostly bug fixes:
  • Bug fix: In Clippings Manager, handle the tree list selection change when the source URL edit is not saved (issue #44). If a clipping's source URL is being edited, and then another clipping or folder is selected without clicking OK (the button with the checkmark icon), the changes are automatically saved. The edit is discarded if the source URL is not a valid URL.
  • Bug fix: Clicking Cancel in shortcut key prompt doesn't cancel (issue #48)
  • Bug fix: Redo clipping creation doesn't restore source URL or color label (issue #49)
  • Bug fix: Label palette doesn't appear correctly on Linux (issue #50)
  • Bug fix: Error on startup in Thunderbird 44, causing the Clippings context menu to not show any clippings (issue #43)
  • Removed usage of the deprecated FUEL/STEEL library
  • Other minor fixes

How to Get It

Head over to the Clippings page on the Mozilla Add-ons website, then scroll to the bottom and expand Development Channel.  Click on the yellow "Add to Firefox" button to install it.

NOTE: When installing Clippings beta releases, you will get a warning saying that the extension is unsigned.  This can be safely ignored; however, unsigned extensions will be blocked in a future release of Firefox, which will cause installation of Clippings beta releases to fail.  If this happens, install Firefox Developer Edition, which allows installation of unsigned extensions for testing purposes.

Help and Support

Send your questions and comments to the AE Creations forums.  If you wish to report a bug, you may do so in GitHub; you will need a GitHub account if you don't have one already.

10 November 2015

Clippings 5.0 beta 2 released -- testers wanted!

This is the second beta release of Clippings 5.0, intended for early adopter users who crave the latest and greatest. Users not comfortable trying out pre-release software and tolerating its inevitable bugs should stick with Clippings 4.1.2 for now.

If you already have a previous release of Clippings installed, you must uninstall it first before installing this release. Because this is a beta release, no automatic upgrades to this release will be available to current Clippings users.

What's New in Beta 2
  • You can now insert a clipping directly from the shortcut key listing dialog, if invoked from CTRL+ALT+V (or Command+Option+V on Mac OS X)
  • Show or hide the details pane (with the shortcut key, label and source web page address of a clipping) in Clippings Manager. The details pane is hidden by default; to display it, select Tools → Show/Hide → Details Pane
  • Improvements to icons in Clippings Manager and extension preferences dialog
See the blog posts for 5.0 beta 1, 5.0 alpha 1 and alpha 2 releases for new features and fixes introduced in those previous releases.

How to Get It

Head over to the Clippings page on the Mozilla Add-ons website, then scroll to the bottom and expand Development Channel.  Click on the yellow "Add to Firefox" button to install it.

Help and Support

Send your questions and comments to the AE Creations forums.  If you wish to report a bug, you may do so in GitHub; you will need a GitHub account if you don't have one already.

05 November 2015

Compatibility of AE Creations extensions with Firefox nightly builds and Firefox Developer Edition

There are upcoming new features and underlying changes to Firefox which will cause the AE Creations extensions to stop working.  If you are using the stable release of Firefox (version 42 at the time of this writing), then this won't impact you.  However, if you are using Firefox Developer Edition (formerly known as Aurora) or Firefox Beta, then you need to be aware of a few things.

Multi-process Tabs

In a nutshell, this new feature, sometimes referred to as Electrolysis or e10s, runs the web page content and the browser chrome code in separate processes.

Clippings, Panic Button, Send Tab URLs and Delicious Post will all break.  If you want to run these extensions in Firefox Beta or Firefox Developer Edition, turn off multi-process tabs. You can do this in the browser preferences page.  These extensions will be updated over the next few months to support Electrolysis, so stay tuned.

Clippings users on Thunderbird should not be impacted by this change.

JavaScript Compatibility with ECMAScript 6 (ES6)

There are changes to Firefox to make its JavaScript engine compliant with the new ES6 standard, but will cause extensions to fail unless they are updated.  Some of the code in Clippings required updating, and this was completed during development of the upcoming 5.0 release.  No updates were needed for the other AE Creations extensions.

Some users have reported that Clippings has stopped working on Firefox 44 alpha (the current Firefox Developer Edition version) because of the ES6 compatibility change that was introduced in this Firefox release.  To work around this issue, install the latest beta release of Clippings 5.0.