It seems that 4.0.4.5 wasn’t the utopian release I hoped it was. Thanks to Trent, Jason, Mark, Cliff, Ian, Brad, Michael and everyone else who patiently emailed in details, I think we’ve got a lot more stability (touch wood!).

* Including Overdue in Today is now a preference
* Some people were not seeing the HAB work correctly in conversations, which should now be fixed
* The ‘kilometre wide Gmail conversations’ bug has been fixed
* You can now pin sub-folder labels to the Review Bar (and search Active Results properly)
* People with dark themes can now see Notes and warning messages more easily
* ‘old’ no longer appears in Group By and Sort By

What’s that Skippy? You want to easily export emails to GCal?

This has been a much-request feature on Get Satisfaction for aaages, and we’ve now got it!

You’ll see a new icon on the Horizontal Action Bar for exporting an email to GCal. It’ll create a new event, and then back in Gmail, try to detect a link to that event and add it to your Notes. So, the email links to the GCal event, and the GCal event links back to the email.

Mark (who lead development on it) & I would love to hear about the usability of it in the comments please

Installing 4.0.4.6

Just pop over to http://activeinboxhq.com/install_preview.php and install as normal!

This is just a little bug fixing release based on everyone’s feedback, thank you so much for all your help!

Fixed A Major Issue With Migrating Deadline Labels

So, some of you could not migrate your labels (the migrate button did nothing), and some of you found ActiveInbox was giving you 0 active results after migration.

It transpires the problem was the same in both cases, and something I’d completely failed to foresee (which is why we do preview releases!).

I won’t bore you with the geeky details, but essentially it was caused by “too many” deadline labels.

The good news is I’ve fixed and so thankfully, there’s no longer an issue with “too many” deadline labels! Everything should be fine now.

Remember Group By and Sort By For Each Type Of Result

Your choice of Group By and Sort By is now saved for Statuses, Deadlines, Projects and your other label types.

So for example, you can organise Statuses by Project, and organise Projects by Deadlines.

Overdue Items Are Included in Today

This might be controversial? Let me know in the comments if you disagree!

Installing It

You can get 4.0.4.5 from http://www.activeinboxhq.com/install_preview.php

I had a New Year’s Resolution that I would stop working crazy late nights… which has lasted less than time than it took to celebrate Christmas itself (and is about on par with all other New Year’s Resolutions!).

Please forgive any terseness in this post, I’m seeing in the early hours of a new day and I’m experiencing that distinctive creative block you get when your brain starts behaving like a petulant toddler who’ll do nothing until you put him to bed. I will try and add screenshots tomorrow.

But I REALLY wanted to get this live and share the tasty morsels of goodness within:

Active Results Simplified (and given sorting)

The Active Results have been cleaned up (including removing that irritating line that stopped you clicking Compose), so that it’s a lot easier to focus on the actual email results. The old, restrictive hierarchy of results has gone away, to be replaced by an intuitive and flexible combination of “Group By” and “Sort By”.

Review Bar opens straight into Active Results

This feels like a really clean interaction and brings an end to a lot of confused emails I receive (I hope!). Now when you click any link on the Review Bar, the Active Results view is the one and only choice. (Note you can change this Preference back to Gmail Results).

Pin Projects to the actual Review Bar

Another much requested one, there is now a checkbox in the Projects (and other label types) dropdown to “Put pinned items on the Review Bar”. This means they really are ever-present and ready to be viewed.

Bug Fixes

4.0.4.x so far has been a preview release – as is this one – and you have been kind enough to report some issues.

The most hair raising one was the people for whom Today/Overdue links disappeared (and had other weird behaviour connected to that), which I *hope* is fixed, but I don’t experience it so I’m working blind. Thanks especially to Blake & Jason for giving me details. Let me know if it still gives you trouble!

Installing 4.0.4.3

As it is still a preview release, I haven’t made it auto-update. You can install it from http://activeinboxhq.com/install_preview.php

Please let me know what you think of the updates in the comments…

I’ve just released 4.0.4.1, available on the original post: http://www.activeinboxhq.com/blog/2012/01/06/hab-where-you-want-it-cleaner-deadline-labels-and-a-little-prettification-4-0-4-0/.

Thank you to everyone that reported problems this afternoon!

It includes the more irritating bugs:
* The Overdue link now sticks to dates, you know, that are actually overdue
* The Active Results can group by Deadline

Do you use deadlines every day or so?

Have you been hoping for more reminders to make sure you hit them?

I’ve been working with Mark to get something cooking and it’s nearly warmed through… now we need some toughs to brawl their way through the probable difficulties such a major new feature will have! 10 deadline power users, to be precise.

If you want to be involved, drop me an email to andym at activeinboxhq.com and I’ll hook you up to the mystery feature. All you need to then do is let Mark & I know if you face any issues.

As with all good competitions, we need Ts & Cs! So, only the first 10 applicants will be accepted, we can’t respond to everyone that asks, editor’s decision is final, and a limerick won’t help your cause (this may not be strictly true).

Happy New Year, followers of the Gregorian calendar, and a friendly wave to everyone else!

We fell into a rather long development cycle in December as we had to undergo a few complex bits & bobs. For this reason, I’m not going to push this release live to everyone, but instead offer it cautiously to power users on the blog. Softly softly…

HAB Where You Want It

The Horizontal Action Bar is now a permanent fixture on Gmail’s header, after much heckling from the stalls, and possibly a few hurled tomatoes.

It means that wherever you scroll on the conversation, the status buttons, deadlines, projects and move-nexters are instantly accessible.

Cleaner Deadline Labels

We had a big discussion about this a few months ago, and it’s finally gone into production.

Essentially, we’ve dropped the 43 folders paradigm (of 12 month labels and 31 day labels, e.g. D/D/6 D/M/1 for today) in favour of a single label in the format ZD/yyyymmdd (e.g. ZD/20120106).

The main reason for this is mobile use. Regular mail clients cannot handle multiple label searches (i.e. the day and the month), so there was no way to review a deadline on the go. Now you can just scan through all known deadline folders.

It’s also visually cleaner, and less likely to go wrong (before it might break if you had the day label but not the month label).

And of course, it can finally consider years.

If you’re wondering, it will clean up after itself: if there are no longer any conversations that have a given deadline label (because they’ve all been completed), ActiveInbox will remove that deadline label from Gmail.

When you load the new version of ActiveInbox, there is a big button on the HAB to migrate your deadlines. Let it run, refresh Gmail, and everything will be ready to go!

And more…

Pete prettified a few bits & pieces: the dropdown calendar is a lot more useable and we’ve finally got “real” pin icons (a constant source of confusion!).

The Notes viewer has a new option “Show Notes on Action Bar Only If Note Written”, so you cannot forget a note you’ve written.

You can install it for:
* Chrome, by clicking http://www.activeinboxhq.com/activeinbox_4-0-4-1.crx
* Firefox, by clicking http://www.activeinboxhq.com/activeinbox_4-0-4-1.xpi

This is a “thinker”. I really need your input here!

My feeling is that moving the Review Bar from the side of Gmail to the top helped enormously with the problem of visibility: it’s much harder to ignore the things you are tracking.

Yet I always believe we can still improve the process of getting email done. My concern is that the list of the inbox gets moved to the lists of Statuses & Deadlines, that for whatever reason we can still avoid.

So what problems do you face in “doing” email each day?

That’s a very open question, so if it helps to think about it:

• Once you’ve set an item to Waiting On, how do you chase it up? Do you do reviews regularly?
• Do you distinguish between Action & Next? And how do you make sure they get done?
• Do you prefer Gmail Results or Active Results? If not Active Results, why? Is it too clunky?
• Would more reminders help? What kind of reminders? Are you tempted to ignore things that aren’t right in front of you?
• Would you ever start Gmail into a view other than the inbox? (E.g. into your active items)
• Do you get overwhelmed by how much there is to do in your Review Bar?
• Do you use Stars as well as labels? What for? Would it help to factor them into the Review Bar?

There’s obviously a great temptation (I just caught myself doing it!) to answer the question in an idealised way: how you like to imagine you’d do it properly. What I’m really keen to understand is the gritty reality of every day.

I’m going to overhaul Active Results this week, so it’s very urgent to get any thoughts in the open so they can factor into our new design.

We’ve just upgraded our server (to prepare for an exciting new feature), and it didn’t go as smoothly as anticipated: there should have been no downtime; but we lost most of the early hours of Saturday morning.

We’ve just got it fixed, so if you refresh Gmail (or if necessary, re-register Plus on your computer by clicking “Register…” in the top right corner of the Review Bar), everything will be running smoothly.

I also quietly released 4.0.3.9 to auto-update yesterday, to:
* Work with the new Gmail header redesign
* Fix bug stopping archive in Send & Archive on some accounts
* Introduce “All To Dos” as an option in the To Do dropdown on the Reviews Bar
* I brought back the miscellaneous ‘Labels’ dropdown for the HAB, that many of you requested!

Now to go menacingly threaten the server with a hammer and the wild eyed look of a man on the edge

In England’s Middle Ages, men convicted of high treason were “drawn by horse to the place of execution, where they were hanged (almost to the point of death), emasculated, disembowelled, beheaded and quartered (chopped into four pieces)”. (The article, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanged,_drawn_and_quartered, is fascinating in its detail!).

I mention this only to give myself a healthy perspective on this very unusual week…

I’m currently under high pressure to take care of several unrelated things, from fixing our error reporting system (the server had problems); to putting systems in place to gather information from surveys, polls and other feedback so we can prioritise what everyone in the community is asking for; to fixing the critical bugs a few of you have been kind enough to report; to finally being able to get back to doing what I love doing most: delivering actual ActiveInbox improvements

The impact of this is that there will probably not be another interesting release until next week, although there may be a minor bug fixing release in a couple of days, and I won’t be appearing much on the support forum. But fear not! Lisa is expertly and warmly answering all of you, and letting me know if anything needs urgently taking care of!

“Send & Archive” is back!

It’s got a slightly simplified design (because the HAB will be going into the fixed-part of Gmail, and so always visible, so we no longer need to embed it in the Reply box); but it’s ready to keep your inbox at zero.

Pinning fixed (no really, I mean it!)

There was still a small group of people who couldn’t pin properly, I’m really sorry about that. It turned into a really finicky problem, but I’ve dealt with it now.

Create Label from Review Bar dropdown

As per request! You can now create labels from the Projects dropdown in the Review Bar.

Previous Emails load on click

I fixed a simple little bug that stopped you opening an email in the Previous Emails list (found when you click Reply in a conversation); so you can quickly catch up on recent discussions to help you write your email.

Notes Dropdown will not lose your notes

Notes had the potential to be really irritating, by closing when you clicked the “Always Show Notes” checkbox, causing you to lose your unsaved note. I’ve fixed this now.

Auto update will kick in soon enough, but you can also grab it from http://www.activeinboxhq.com/install.php.

Update that changed 4.0.3.5 to 4.0.3.6

Okay, it’s 3:22am (I thought I’d mention it because I’m exhausted and it’s an opportunity to play my violin!), but thanks to Michael and David I realised shortly after 4.0.3.5 got released that there were visual glitches in the To Do dropdown, and possibly still (STILL!) issues with pinning being remembered. I’ve just pushed 4.0.3.6 to get them fixed, about an hour after 4.0.3.5 originally went live (and late in both Europe and the US), so I hope only a handful of people were affected with the bad release.