17 December 2015

Clippings 5.0 release candidate 2 released!

This second release candidate build of Clippings 5.0 fixes a few cosmetic bugs.  It is now available from the Mozilla Add-ons website; see below for instructions on how to get it.  If there are no further last-minute issues, this will become the official release-to-web build.

What's New in Clippings 5.0
  • Clipping color labels
  • New name search mode lets you quickly locate a clipping that you want to paste by typing its name and selecting it from an autocomplete menu. To activate it, press CTRL+ALT+V (or Command+Option+V on Mac OS X).  Switch between shortcut key and name search modes by pressing the TAB key
  • You can now insert a clipping directly from the shortcut key help window, if accessed from the shortcut key prompt
  • Save the source URL (web address) of a clipping. In the New Clipping dialog, click Options and select the checkbox option "Save the address of the source web page".  Available for Firefox only
  • Improvements to Clippings Manager to maximize the area in the window for editing your clippings. The details pane (with the shortcut key, label and source web page address of a clipping) is hidden by default; to display it, select Tools → Show/Hide → Details Pane
  • Placeholders with default values.  Example: $[placeholderName{defaultValue}].  When pasting a clipping with such a placeholder, the dialog prompt will supply a default value which you can accept or change.
  • Placeholders with multiple selectable values.  Example: $[placeholderName{value1|value2|value3|...}].  When pasting a clipping with such a placeholder, the dialog prompt will display a drop-down menu where you can select from the available values.
  • New Placeholder Toolbar in Clippings Manager, for novice users discovering the convenience of placeholders.  Turn it on by clicking Tools → Placeholder Bar in Clippings Manager
  • A fresh new look for the Clippings toolbar button in Firefox and Thunderbird, the Clippings context menu and Clippings Manager
  • Visual enhancements to the Clippings context menu on Linux.  Folder menus appear in bold, and clippings with color labels are colorized in the submenus, to compensate for the inability to show menu item icons on some Linux distributions
  • Many other improvements to keep Clippings up to date with current and next few releases of Firefox and Thunderbird

Supported Languages

Clippings 5.0 is available in English (United States), French, and Italian.  New in version 5.0 is support for Finnish and Slovenian.

Unfortunately, due to the lack of availability of translators, many of the languages that Clippings was previously available in are unavailable for 5.0.  If you are fluent in English and another world language and would like to help update the translations for Clippings, consider joining Babelzilla and signing up for your language team.

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.

Clippings now requires Firefox/Thunderbird version 31 or newer.  If you have an older version of either application, you must upgrade to install Clippings 5.0.

Users of Firefox Developer Edition: Clippings is not yet compatible with multi-process browser tabs (a.k.a. Electrolysis or e10s) in Firefox.  This will be addressed in an upcoming release.  In the meantime, turn off multi-process tabs to continue using Clippings.

Help and Support

Questions and comments about Clippings should be directed to the AE Creations Help and Support forums, hosted on Google Groups

14 December 2015

Clippings 5.0 release candidate 1 released!

Finally, the release candidate of the long-awaited 5.0 release of Clippings is now available!

Clippings 5.0 release candidate 1 is now available from the Mozilla Add-ons website.  See below for instructions on how to get it.  If there are no last-minute issues, this will become the official release-to-web build.

What's New in Clippings 5.0
  • Clipping labels.  You can label your clippings by color
  • Save the source URL (web page address) of a clipping at the time it is created.  This works when creating a clipping from text on a web page; in the New Clipping dialog, click Options and select the checkbox option "Save the address of the source page".  Available for Firefox only
  • You can now paste a clipping by searching for it by name and then selecting it from an autocomplete menu.  Activate clipping search mode the same way the shortcut key paste mode is activated: press CTRL+ALT+V (or Command+Option+V on Mac OS X).  Switch between shortcut key and search-by-name modes by pressing the TAB key
  • Placeholders with default values.  Example: $[placeholderName{defaultValue}].  When pasting a clipping with such a placeholder, the dialog prompt will supply a default value which you can accept or change.
  • Placeholders with multiple selectable values.  Example: $[placeholderName{value1|value2|value3|...}].  When pasting a clipping with such a placeholder, the dialog prompt will display a drop-down menu where you can select from the available values.
  • New Placeholder Toolbar in Clippings Manager, to make it easier for novice users to insert placeholders into a clipping.  Turn it on by clicking Tools → Placeholder Toolbar
  • 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
  • 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)

Supported Languages

Clippings 5.0 is available in English (United States), French, and Italian.  New in version 5.0 is support for Finnish and Slovenian.

Unfortunately, due to the lack of availability of translators, many of the languages that Clippings was previously available in are unavailable for 5.0.  If you are fluent in English and another world language and would like to help update the translations for Clippings, consider joining Babelzilla and sign up for your language team for Clippings.

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 release candidate builds, 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.