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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Clippings 5.0 beta 1 released -- testers wanted!

This is the first 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 1

• New toolbar icon for Firefox and Thunderbird, new icons for the Clippings context menu, Clippings Manager, and extension preferences dialog
• Options to include source web page addresses when exporting clippings, and remove all source web page addresses from any clippings that have them
• Bug fix: label picker palette didn't display properly on Mac OS X

See the blog posts for 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.

AE Creations website outage

The AE Creations website is currently unavailable due to a server outage on SourceForge.net, the website host.  This outage has been going on since 17 July.

In the meantime, the minimalistic fallback site, hosted on GitHub, is available for those who seek the comfort of visiting a website with the AE Creations name.  The Mozilla Add-ons pages for Clippings, Panic Button, Send Tab URLs and Delicious Post are available as well.

Updated 2015-07-22: The website is now up and running again.

Clippings 5.0 alpha 2 released!

This is the second alpha 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 an alpha release, no automatic upgrades to this release will be available to current Clippings users.

What's New

This release fixes a few issues that were discovered in alpha 1, and introduces a few new features:

• A new option to 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
• New Placeholder Bar in Clippings Manager, to make it easier for novice users to insert placeholders into a clipping.  Turn it on by clicking Tools -> Placeholder Bar in Clippings Manager
• Bug fix: Placeholder prompt dialog didn't appear when the default value of the placeholder contained spaces (issue #33)
• Bug fix: In Clippings Manager, the source URL of a clipping was blank (instead of displaying "None") when there was no source URL on the clipping

Things You Should Know About

• The clipping label picker does not display correctly on Mac OS X.
• Debugging functionality has been temporarily enabled for this alpha release.  You may notice verbose logging in the browser console and repeated beeps when editing a clipping in Clippings Manager.

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.

Clippings 5.0 alpha 1 - testers wanted

This is the first alpha 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 an alpha release, no automatic upgrades to this release will be available to current Clippings users.

What's New

• 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 URL of the source page".  Available for Firefox only
• Redesigned New Clipping dialog
• 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.

Things You Should Know About

• The clipping label picker on Mac OS X does not display correctly.
• Debugging functionality has been temporarily enabled for this alpha release.  You may notice verbose logging in the browser console and repeated beeps when editing a clipping in Clippings Manager.

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.

Delicious website issues may affect Delicious Post

Delicious is currently undergoing a data center move, but there are outstanding issues which is affecting Delicious Post.  (Delicious is owned by Science LLC, and AE Creations is not affiliated with it, nor has any involvement in the Delicious website.)

These issues may cause problems when posting links to your Delicious page.  You may receive error messages such as "error posting link" or "504 GATEWAY_TIMEOUT".

All I can say is to try posting again later.  There isn't much else I can suggest, as these errors are being relayed back from the Delicious service.