ScribeFire has been around for a while – almost three years now. When version 1.0 was released, Firefox 1.5 was the latest and greatest browser around.

Starting with Firefox 2, Mozilla began creating improved methods for extensions to store their settings, but until now, ScribeFire wasn’t taking advantage of them. However, over the past few weeks, we’ve been busy rewriting and updating the code in ScribeFire that is responsible for storing things like notes, blog entries, and the settings for all of your blogs to have them use these newer Mozilla features. While these updates won’t change the way ScribeFire appears to work, they will allow us to fix bugs and add features more quickly in the future.

Due to the extent of the behind-the-scenes changes, we’re asking anyone who would like to help us get this next release out the door to download this beta version of ScribeFire 3.1 and test it out. It shouldn’t appear to work any differently than version 3.0.1; all of your notes, blogs, and posting history should be transferred seamlessly to the new system.

If, after downloading and installing this beta version, you encounter something that is not working as it did before, please report it as a bug here, or you can just leave a comment on this post explaining the problem.

Warning: while we’ve given it some thorough testing, we can’t guarantee that you won’t lose some of your settings by trying out this version. However, if your settings are not transferred correctly, we will be able to give you instructions on reverting to the previous version of ScribeFire and restoring your notes and settings.

Last month, we asked you what new features you’d like to see in ScribeFire. Since then, we have been investigating the feasibility of the enhancements you requested, and we would like to respond to your feedback.

For the following features, we’ve started working on them and they should be present in one of the next releases: (You can click on the linked words to comment on the feature or view its progress.)

• Synchronize settings between computers
• Ability to delete multiple notes
• Support for Thunderbird
• Automatically check the “Modify Timestamp” box when the timestamp is changed
• Ability to organize list of blogs

Some of the features you asked for have since been completed or were already there, but you just didn’t know it:

• Word count (Right click, choose View > Word count)
• Live Preview (ala Windows Live Writer); added in version 2.3
• Image uploading for Blogger; has been in ScribeFire for a while now; if it’s not working for you, file a bug report
• Keyboard shortcuts; they were broken for a few versions but have since been fixed
• A better publishing workflow was added in version 2.3
• Spellchecking; ScribeFire has always used Firefox’s spellchecker; if it’s not working for you, file a bug report
• Image titles; just select the image, right click, and choose “Edit Properties…”

There were a few requests that we’ve decided not to take any action on, mostly due to time constraints:

• Make ScribeFire an independent application
• Send comments from ScribeFire
• Automatic posting to multiple blogs. This one has come up before, and our current response is still to just click “Keep Content” after it posts to the first blog, and then change blogs and publish again. We may reconsider this feature in the future.
• Facebook Notes integration
• Multi-user support (multiple users in one Firefox profile). This is handled well enough by Firefox’s mulit-profile support.

For most of the other features that were requested, we haven’t started working on them, but we’ve put them on our To-Do list and will get to them eventually:

• Color code drafts vs. published entries in the Entries list
• Title templates for “Blog This”
• Gallery2 integration
• Clipmarks integration
• Button for code
• ScribeFire in the sidebar
• Customize WYSIWYG editor font
• Better Flickr search
• Better support for blog-specific features (like in LiveJournal, MySpace, etc.)
• Image thumbnail creation
• Image padding
• Better table support
• Google Video support
• Better Joomla support

We appreciate that you took the time to give us your feedback; in the future, you can request a new feature or report a bug at any time by filling out this form.

ScribeFire users, as you have seen with our QuickAds announcement we are hard at work making monetizing your blog as effortless as possible.  Our goal is to make ScribeFire the ultimate blogging platform that gives you everything you need to make blogging easier, more profitable and more fun all right at your finger tips.

What other services or products do you use today that you would like to see integrated directly into ScribeFire?  Please let me know in the comments below or if you are a provider of such a product or service that you think would be a great tie in for over 150,000 active users of ScribeFire, reach out to me at patrick (at) scribefire.com  Thank you!

We’re working on an exciting new ScribeFire feature, and we need some beta testers. If you are interested in testing something new in the world of blog editors and are able and willing to give detailed feedback on your experience, send an e-mail to cfinke@gmail.com with the subject line “ScribeFire Beta Test.” We’ll contact you shortly thereafter with more details.

We want ScribeFire to be the best blogging tool out there, and as part of that quest, we’re taking a look at possible updates to the design and layout of the editor.

Here’s our current design (click for full-size):

And here’s a proposed redesign (click for full-size):

What do you like about the new design? What don’t you like? Any other changes you would make?

You’ll notice that the site has a different look. Feel free to give your feedback on it in the comments.

Update: The latest preview build is here.

A lot of changes have been made in order to add tabbed editing to ScribeFire, so we’re releasing a preview release before a general release to let early adopters try it out and submit feedback before we unleash it on the general ScribeFire population.

You can download/install this version (1.4.9pre) at the ScribeFire Google Code project. While using it, submit your feedback as comments on this post or as a new issue.

Here’s a screenshot of the new layout:

Tabbed editing and smaller tabs for accessing the non-editor panes.

Also, timestamp editing was enabled for users of all browsers, not just Firefox 3:

ScribeFire users: how does this screenshot make you feel?

Note: This is just a preview. Tabbed editing has not yet been released.

Update: The latest preview build is here.

For anyone who downloaded version 1.4.8 and was unhappy with how often the “You haven’t saved this post…” prompt popped up: you should install this nightly build. It is identical to ScribeFire 1.4.8 except for some improvements in when the dialog appears to prompt you to save your progress.

Please continue to leave feedback, either in a comment on this post or at the ScribeFire Google Code project.

We’re going to be updating ScribeFire more frequently from now on, and we’d like to get a better idea of what’s bugging you. Head on over to the Google Code project for ScribeFire and “star” any bug that affects you or that you really want fixed. Since we can sort the bugs by how many stars they get, we can prioritize which bugs get fixed based on the needs of the community.