Polar Rose plugin version 0.50 is here

As most of the active beta testers will have discovered by now through the Firefox auto-update service, we released a major upgrade of the plugin on Monday evening, taking us to version 0.50.


A few visible highlights of the release:



  • Stability! As those of you who have used the plugin know – and as originally reported – the plugin has had a longstanding issue of often losing connection and stopping to show roses. This has been solved and I’m happy to see the web sprinkled with roses again.

  • Several core performance enhancements, including a much faster rendering of roses on photos.

  • New status and error messages for better debugging.

  • Improved auto-complete of names (which will get better yet soon)


The new plugin is basically a full rewrite and for those of you who are interested in the underlying solution, we have started rendering the drop-down naming window as an iframe served from polarrose.com. This allows much greater flexibility with regards to adding new features to the plugin by simply changing the corresponding pages server-side.


(For a more in-depth overview read the separate post by my colleague Stefan Arentz.)


Next up will be the Internet Explorer plugin, the first matching using the data that has been accumulated by our beta users, and finally our APIs – two of the three will be coming in time for Christmas.


Please report any issues through the feedback page or feel free to comment directly on this post.


Finally, thanks to Mo Jo for leading this rewrite and the rest of the crew in Warsaw, Amsterdam and Malmö for making this happen.


PS. We’ll be adding more beta users as soon as the new plugin has proven itself in the wild over the next days.

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12 Responses to “Polar Rose plugin version 0.50 is here”

  1. Lucie Lui Says:

    How about the privacy function you promised here: http://blog.polarrose.com/2007/07/our-private-beta-launch/ ?

  2. Nikolaj Nyholm Says:

    Lucie,

    Despite the v0.50 mark on the plugin, we haven’t reached mark 3 on the roadmap you reference. The first privacy functions will be in one of the next plugin releases.

    /n

  3. Polar Rose: Facial recognition software that works? | David Cancel Says:

    [...] they released a new version. This thing actually works now and so far it’s been [...]

  4. cougarten Says:

    what do you expect from the APIs?

    have fun and so on :),

    Cougarten

  5. cougarten Says:

    one Rose can partly cover another:
    http://screencast.com/t/CmLN8aH0i

  6. Nikolaj Nyholm Says:

    @cougarten:

    • apis i’ll have to wait with sharing for another while.
    • roses covering one another: now that’s an interesting case! sent on to the tech team. we’ll have to think about how to best solve it from a ui perspective.
  7. Hans Says:

    When are you ever going to start using the face recognition feature?

    How many years has it been now? The automatic face recognition is the only reason we are all here.

    We don’t come here to find pictures that people tagged manually. We can already do that. We want to find all the pictures of specific people, friends, ourselves, that noone tagged, but was only found by your software crawling the internet and recognizing those faces.

    Please, that is what you promised way way back, and forgive me for being demanding, but that is the only reason I ever came to this site, and I can’t wait for it, and it doesn’t seem to be getting anywhere.

  8. Nikolaj Nyholm Says:

    @Hans, as I wrote in the post “Next up will be the Internet Explorer plugin, the first matching using the data that has been accumulated by our beta users, and finally our APIs – two of the three will be coming in time for Christmas.”

    We’re as impatient as anyone to turn on matching, but without the base training data that beta users have been collecting until now, we can’t do matching. It’s hard to find ‘more pictures’ if we don’t have any others…

    /n

  9. tasmus Says:

    Hey,
    Will you release a plugin for Fx3 before it goes out of Beta? I’m using Fx3b1 and I am not able to install the PolarRose plugin :-(
    Thanks,
    Rasmus

  10. suni Says:

    match who

  11. Paul Says:

    You seem to be very nice people. Good luck with your project.

    I can’t get anything out of this site thus far.
    I’ll keep trying.

  12. Bhasi Bahuleyan Says:

    I predict that this is an epoch making event and I wish it come true with full completion at the earliest

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