Polar Rose Blog – A blog about sharing photos & other stuff that matters to us
What ever happened to those T-shirts?
A while ago, we turned off the our beta-plugin, used by our early beta-testers to help us improve our algorithms and the service as a whole. As a thank you, we promised to send them a T-shirt. As a result, we were inundated with requests.
Getting all the shipping set up proved to be quite a bit more work than we thought. Sophie managed to figure out how to handle it though, so without further ado, here’s a quick movie (shot in ShakyCam™) of what has been happening …
A new release!
Well, its been 6 weeks since the release of the new site, and therefore it’s time for a big update!
Many changes and improvements have been made. Here’s a list covering most of them:
- A special “seen-with” tab, that can be accessed from within a stack.
- All of the tabs now have proper URLs, like http://www.polarrose.com/found/paris+hilton/stack1/seen-with/#60. These can be accessed directly and will even remember how many results were displayed, when you browse back to them.
- New front-page, with more explanation of what Polar Rose is and does.
- A screencast of Polar Rose in action!
- Your collections (found, favorites, me) are now shown as stacks on your homepage, which is now located directly at www.polarrose.com! The old URL for your homepage will redirect you automatically.
- The top bar has been simplified, with prominent “home”, “downloads” and “help” buttons
There is also a minor update to the Firefox plugin (to version 0.55.9). The changelog is as follows:
- Fixes roses not appearing on certain sites, like people.com.
- Updated status bar icons for Firefox 3 Mac.
The server-side of the plugin has also seen several performance enhancements.
Oh yeah… we’re also going public beta! No more invites. No more waiting around. Just sign up and get an account immediately!
We are of course not sitting still. There is much more to come over the next couple of weeks!
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.
