Grrr! Gmail Gets Coloured Labels

Actually that should be a ‘yay, gmail gets coloured labels’, because it’s a planned feature I no longer have to code; but of course, a new Gmail feature means a modified Gmail, which once more broke GTDInbox. (In fact, coming home to GTDInbox tonight was not unlike assessing the collateral damage after a bomb…).

But there is a bigger problem for us here – the Gmail engineers have pledged to update Gmail much more often; which greatly increases the chance of GTDInbox being broken. They have been kind enough to include a light-weight way for developers like me to (safely) work with Gmail’s internals; but it’s currently very limited, and so is not the solution (yet). Hopefully in the future this will help stablise GTDInbox.

Happily though, following tonight’s events I’ve quickly crafted a “rapid-response” solution to automatically repair GTDInbox when Gmail updates. Hopefully this means you’ll never have to witness the emotional rollercoaster that is finding GTDInbox broken (at least not again ;) ). Famous last words & all that…

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 4th, 2007 at 4:51 pm and is filed under Extensions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

  • Anders

    Oh no. Does this mean we have to wait even longer for v2? I’m going crazy not being able to organize my inbox.

  • Andy

    @Anders
    It’s ok, I just lost a few hours; back on track now :)

  • Anders

    Sweet :D
    Any ETA for a 2.0 release?

  • Arnd

    I find it interesting that Gmail has adopted the quick-label-removal links (‘x’). Apparently they are looking at GTDInbox for inspiration. So this change should be taken as a compliment to your GTDInbox efforts. Congrats!

    Also I already use a hacked version of the Gmail Label Colors GM script to highlight the GTD labels. So this can now be done out of the box.

    Regarding the incompatibility which may occur when GMail changes, it would be nice if the user could always fall back to the ‘older version’ with the old GTDInbox extension, without reconfiguring my browser.

  • Ed Pontius

    Colored tags are a major step forward, in my view-

    My RED S:ACTION tags really stand out in my message list-

    However, I’m wondering if color tags might be useful as dynamic assignments- for instance- clicking on a button might make all of the tags that meet a particular condition- such as a context of “Office” RED…

    And- I’m still interested in whether ‘templates’ could be used to coordinate agreed-upon communications between GTDInbox users in speech-act format- Is this of interest to anyone else or just to me?

    Thanks-

    Ed

  • http://Michael.Massing.googlepages.com Michael

    Seems to me the “uh-oh” to watch out for in Google’s announcement of the colored labels is their postscripted intention to add “some folder-y-ish functionality” which, when rolled out, might override or complicate the present (ad hoc?) scheme of sublabels.

    Best to all,
    M.

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