OutWit Hub beta 1 is online.This build (OutWit Kernel 0.7.0.183 & OutWit Hub 0.5.0.33) includes all the base features and fixes the major bugs after the last period of Alpha testing. We sincerely hope you will enjoy it. Please give us your feedback.

Today, it’s raining Haribo gummy bears in the office… Version 0.7.0 alpha 11 is officially named ‘beta 1 rc1’!

The current source code of the Kernel and the first outfits already represent over 50,000 lines of javascript, XUL and c++, the work and guts of six developers, an absurd number of sleepless nights, over 148 sacks of Haribo gummy bears, some teeth gnashing, some mouse smashing and quite some laughs… Finally, I have to say we are proud of the baby. Of course, we are still very far from a brushed-up, documented and bugless release version, with an API. This will be v1.0. Still, even before the API is ready and stabilized, we believe that this 0.7 version already gives enough flesh for tech savvy users to start playing around and produce their own tools.

It was very frustrating, in columns of figures with different thousand or decimal separators, or in various units, to not be able to sort the rows properly. It’s a frequent need: the lightest, cheapest camera,  the highest summit…. We had to do something about it. Now, there is an option, in the right-click menu, to normalize the figures so that the sort function can work properly.

The current slideshow feature of the Hub is very basic. I’ve been working on a sexier version, with transitions and stuff. It might not be extremely important in the Hub itself, but it will be important for OutWit Images. I’m very open to suggestions on this one, for new features, look and feel etc.

Finally managed to reproduce the ghost bug of the disappearing scroll bar on the page widget. It’s a tricky one: only happens in some packaged versions when going back and forth from the Hub to another FireFox window. Working on it.

I thought our test cases were a wee bit far-fetched: Who would actually look for the volumes of water in all the large lakes of the world? Well I guess I just found one. Received a mail from Mark, a university professor, telling me that the lake scraper had been very helpful for him, except that the volume figures were only present in less than a third of the lake descriptions in wikipedia. Mark wanted our suggestion… For now, the only answer I could give him was that we should all spend more time entering stuff in Wikipedia. Not sure it’s what he expected, though.

For those who know how trees work in XUL, you’ll see how much work was done in the widgets with trees. (By whom, do you think?) And you’ll certainly find the few bugs left in scrolls, refresh, etc. FireFox 3 is coming soon, with a lot of modifications in the trees behavior and we have decided to put this work on hold until it’s out. (Really looking forward to this FirFox 3 version: fixing XUL trees is not exactly my thing.)

For the first time we can actually collect tens (or hundreds) of images or PDF files on a topic, simply saving them in a folder on the hard disk and letting OutWit Hub do the job. Of course, the feature did work in the original standalone prototype, but it is good to finally see it in action in the Firefox extension.

OutWit Technologies is a startup created last year around a simple, tremendously ambitious and quite fun project: allow any non-geeky Web user say “I asked my computer to search the Web for all the (…) that (…)”.

On the way to a suite of smooth and intuitive products, we will release often: First for advanced users, then for everyone. We are first going to release (hopefully before April) the “Kernel”, with a whole library of recognition and extraction features, and the “Hub”, a first user interface in which we’ll try to fit as many of the Kernel features as possible. Then, one by one, we will release more focused applications using the Kernel —each with one clear purpose and very few buttons— to collect images, to search an old friend on the net, or to find a job…

But hopefully, most applications will come from our users, and we will make a point of keeping an open architecture, building (and documenting as soon as we can) an API for all Mozilla developers to create their own tools around the OutWit Kernel.