Well, my Christmas/New Year vacations are almost over. The last two weeks have been quite busy, although I decided to spend some quality time with Speed Dial. The result? I added 3 new major new features:
- Dial Groups: basically, it’s a tab bar for Speed Dial, which will allow the organization of dials by category.
- MultiKey: Because that “dial groups” feature can substantially increase the number of dials, this feature allows to access any dial by using keyboard shortcuts. This is enabled by default, so when there are more than 9 dials, the behavior changes. For example, if you press “Ctrl+1″, and there are more than 9 dials, a window will appear, which will show the dial assigned at position “1″. Pressing another number will act like a TV remote control, so if you would press “2″, it would show the dial at “12″. Using backspace will remove the last introduced dial, and using the cursor keys (and the “+” and “-” keys) will cycle through the existing dials. Releasing the “Ctrl” key will select the specified dial.
- Thumbnail cropping: I received quite a lot of complaints about people not being able to read the thumbnail properly. This feature will allow to select an interesting portion of the assigned website! This is complemented by the “Crop Selector”, a visual tool to select the desired area.
Other than that there are a lot of other features and improvements, like the ability to use an alternative URL for thumbnail generation, to choose between 4 types of scaling, options to increase the quality of the thumbnail, a reduced configuration dialog that will show when Speed Dial is installed (actually, it’s more like a one-page wizard), special treatment for images… I’m rather proud of this release 
I already posted it in Speed Dial download mirror page. However, it will take a while until it’s available in AMO, as I would like to have it localized before that. I woul really like to get feedback on this new version, so feel free to comment about it or contact me by email.