ThumbStrips

We are working on the next release of TS, and have been scouring through your comments for ideas on what to fix, add, or change about TS. There are so many, but a couple big ones we’ve heard from a lot of folks (and will definitely be in this release):

• “Figure out a way for TS to use less of my CPU” / “it takes too long to save a TS”
• “Let me choose the sites I don’t want TS to record”

So here’s your chance, vote for the feature(s) you think should be in the next release - and tell us why:

• Annotation - write extra details about the pages in your TS
• Customized order - change the order of the pages, drag & drop maybe?
• Menu bar - reduce the size of the buttons on the menu bar
• Navigation - get rid of the arrow buttons, just use mouse or bottom bar to scroll
• Plug-ins - let me show my TS in different places… Facebook app, Blog This button, others?
• Website - make it easier to share my TS and check out what other people have posted
• Customized preferences - let me set how I want TS to start up and work
• Customized look - let me choose a different look & feel for my TS
• Docking toolbar - let me move the whole viewer
• History - tie TS to my history, and the history preferences
• Other - don’t see the one change you really want… what is it?

Vote for as many or as few options as you’d like. Comment here on this blog, or over in the forum post - and remember, the feature with the most votes will be included in the next version of ThumbStrips.

There have been some great suggestions, comments, and questions posted on the ThumbStrips page over the last few days. Thanks to everyone for taking the time to share your thoughts, and in the name of being fair, I thought I’d tackle the top-3 most recent questions here:

Why does the ThumbStrips viewer only show the first page thumbnail and nothing else for me?
Yeah, this little bugger’s a pain. We’re working with a couple TS users directly to try and better troubleshoot this problem (thanks comroe & rondine!), and in this instance it was that TS wasn’t playing nice with McAfee SiteAdvisor. The short-term solution to get TS working is to disable McAfee, but we know that’s not a great long-term solution, so we are still working on this. If you have any ideas, let us know.

Why do I get an alert when I close Firefox - is that ThumbStrips?
Yes, it’s ThumbStrips doing an auto-save of your last browser session, and it’s not quite done at the time you are closing Firefox. We’ve seen a few comments where folks are asking for an auto-save feature, so you can rest assured - it’s there. My question to you guys - have you gone back and opened up a previous TS session? What did you do with it - did you add on more thumbnails, did you go back to a specific page, something different? We think the auto-save is a useful feature, but I want to know what you guys think.

Why doesn’t ThumbStrips open automatically when I open Firefox?
Well, we figured you open Firefox with a specific task in mind - whether it’s checking the news, searching for something, etc - so we didn’t want to get in the way of that. TS is running in the background when you open your browser, so you aren’t losing any of your browsing session - but we aren’t taking up your web “real estate” with the viewer all the time. That was just our thought - but I’m curious, if more people are browsing with the viewer open all the time, are you using it to jump between pages instead of the back / forward buttons?

That’s it for now, but keep that feedback coming in!