We’ll be experiencing some smaller outages to both the Polar Rose website and plugin over the next three days as we do some upgrades. Thanks for your patience.
Update: First stage is done. We have a new plugin out for all beta-users. Tell your Firefox to search for updates or restart your IE to get it. Hope you like it! More to come in the next few days…
Today we release a new site with a cleaner simpler look & feel. The main focus of this release is improved search functionality including clustered search results (stacks as we like to call them) based on facial similarity.
The Polar Rose plugin is now available for Internet Explorer (version 7) so please try it out and report any bugs that you find! We also made some modifications to the plugin user interface to bring it in line with the new site look.
User interface improvements…
The main goal of the user interface re-design was to make searching and browsing results easier and more intuitive. We also wanted to simplify the other interaction points (forms, settings etc.) and the plugin user interface. Finally we wanted to create a user interface which is easier to expand upon and add new functionality to.
Look out for an upcoming post with more about the future user interface developments we are working on.
Under the hood…
We have built a new flexible and scalable infrastructure to support increased numbers of users – more beta invites will be sent out soon! We also now utilize a content delivery network (CDN) to make the output of search queries faster.
In closing…
Todays release represents a lot of hard work by the whole team at Polar Rose and we all look forward to your feedback and comments. We are already busy designing and developing many improvements and new features which we will be releasing over the coming weeks and months!
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:
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.
A service message to our beta users…
Today we’ve updated the Polar Rose plugin to version 0.26. The changes aren’t immediately visible, but the update contains several performance enhancements.
Unfortunately, Firefox’s autoupdate functionality doesn’t always work as intended and we’re getting a few reports that the plugin is not being updated automatically. Instead, please click the “Find updates” button which you can find under Tools > Add-ons in Firefox’s menu to manually find updates.
Should even that fail, you can always manually download the latest version at the Polar Rose downloads page.