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by BlackForestBoy 2436 days ago
Oliver here, from the Memex team.

Yeah we know it has not been really well functioning in the past few months. Had a lot of bugs.

We finally got a bigger round of funding and are now able to fix those. Until February our main focus is improving release stability through fully integration testing the UI and backend, fixing all major bugs, improvements to UI/UX and the release of the mobile Apps+Sync.

Too bad this post has been upvoted so much now, a few weeks later things would have already been much much better :)

Regarding the bugs you mention I would like to know more if you could help me out here: 1. Which browser and system are you working on? 2. When you say the settings changed back to "intrusive & useless", what do you mean by that? 3. When you say "it never worked well" what were you expecting to be working but it didnt?

Thanks and sorry for the troubles Memex causes.

1 comments

Sorry to give you a bad review, and i look forward to seeing the version where everything works and it just magically does what you want.

My browsers would be firefox on windows. To expand on "intrusive and useless": I found myself turning off the "respond when i type" setting several times. the few times i did search for something, it hadn't been "seen" because the indexing was off again, or terms just were not found.

> Sorry to give you a bad review

Please don't feel sorry. :) If something does not work then we deserve those things to be said, also publicly. It's what after all helps us to improve and keeps us accountable.

> "respond when i type" setting several times.

I am confused about that setting. Not aware we have that anywhere? Can you explain a bit more what you mean by that?

> the indexing was off again

That can be, we had some issues with FF permissions for things to be copied to clipboard. We had to manually add that permission to the install process (only for FF). And I missed doing that a few times. (sorry about that). We are about to automate that process in the next releases so that does not happen anymore. I assume what happened is that the extension was turned off because on update it required some of the permissions to be granted again.

it has been a month or more since i turned it off; so i can't be more specific; but it was popping the sidebar up in circumstances where i didnt want it, and i recall chasing down a setting that stopped it.

Your explanation of permissions sounds like a very likely cause for most of the things that annoyed me :) Text search is hard, I know that from mere experiments and demos; adding the "be a browser plugin" to that must make life fun indeed.

> but it was popping the sidebar up in circumstances where i didnt want it

Ok so the core issue was that the sidebar was popping up in places you didn't want to? Or was it also that the keyboard shortcuts were firing the sidebar to appear in places you didn't want?

> Text search is hard, I know that from mere experiments and demos; adding the "be a browser plugin" to that must make life fun indeed.

Yes, it was/is quite painful, especially in the browser. With its changing APIs, and websites constantly changing and using different technologies, makes browsers a very hostile environment to work with. We can't even do test releases with the chrome/firefox store. So we have to roll out all updates to all users at once. Crazy.

Before we focused on building something to show how our vision could work at the expense of stability. It was in a lot of ways not a good move because we probably could have been financially independent with a little less features that were more stable and better worked out. However our approach also allowed us to show the vision and get bigger amounts of funding. Now is the time to make the current feature set nice to use and people feel like it is worth financially supporting.