Over the last few weeks I’ve been squeezing in functionality updates where I can; and something interesting is starting to happen… GTDInbox feels like it has undergone a ‘step change’ improvement, and it’s noticeably more powerful. So, the next release will be 2.1, and I hope it’ll be the last major visible design modification GTDInbox has (of existing features).

I’m not quite sure when it will be ready – the development version is a pretty ugly right now! But I’m hoping soon. I’m aware that in recent releases GTDInbox has continued to essentially be a beta product, and is still a little rough around the edges (although I like to think it’s getting better!). So, as of 2.1, I want to properly split GTDInbox into 2 streams – a ‘stable’ release stream, and a ‘development’ release stream. So people who want to experiment and take risks with it can; and those who just want a peaceful existence can do so more easily. (Props to captbunzo for busting my chops on this).

As 2.1 begins to stabilise, I’ll start doing some previews of the new functionality – I hope you can wait until then!

I actually forgot in the last post about some other new features I added, both found when viewing a thread/conversation…

Reply to Self (found near the ‘Reply’ box)
Clicking this will send the reply you’re writing to yourself, specifically, to the end of the thread. It’s used to add detail to existing tasks, or to add private notes to discussions you’re having with other people.

Bump (found in ‘More Actions’ drop down)
This is a quick way to add a blank reply to the thread, causing the message to jump back to being the first item in your inbox. It’s a useful way to ‘retrieve’ a message that is sinking into your inbox.

Ok, I was lucky (which meant Sarah was good enough to grant me time off for good behaviour) to sneak some extra hours into GTDInbox, to compensate for the time lost to handling clients. And I’m even more pleased to say, this is a pretty big update.

Most significantly, the contentious Dashboard has been removed. Many of you said it took too much space; so I replaced it with a drop down menu instead (props to Paul Thompson/captbunzo for further refining the UI design). Next, I made Reviews (aka saved searches) fully customisable – and even use some special sauce not normally available in Gmail (such as relative time to the current date) – so you can create your own. Finally – and perhaps most significantly for many of you – we finally patched up problems with other addons (and added some advanced options to make sure that you have greater control over GTDInbox’s behaviour in future).

Oh, and the single coolest addition? You can double click stuff! So, when processing your inbox, you can double click the GTD icon (on each row) to Finish it and double right click to Delete it (or shift + double left click to Delete it).
And when you toggle labels using GTDInbox (e.g. add S/Action to a thread), if you double click rather than single click, it’ll toggle the label and then auto-archive it. So you add project/context/reference labels, then double click on S/Action to apply the status and move it out your inbox.

You can download from http://gtdinbox.com/#install or download direct from (http://gtdinbox.com/gtdinbox_2-0-8-1.xpi).

(Additional props go to Máté Rémiás who was very helpful in pre-release testing and pinpointing problems with other addons – cheers Máté!).

Update #1 01/05/2008
Hold on to your horses! It looks like there is a small glitch here where the default Reviews are not added (+ Betty is having some Label display problems I’m investigating). 2.0.8.1 will roll shortly…

Update #2 01/05/2008
Okay,  2.0.8.1 is ready. Sorry to those of you who just downloaded 2.0.8, I only noticed the glitch when Betty emailed!

Just a quick note to apologise for the fact I’ve not been in the forum as often as I would have liked, or rather, I’ve not been talking as much as normal. I have been listening! The reason is simply that time is really tight at the moment, and I’ve been using every spare minute to actually work on GTDInbox, which will pay off with the very imminent 2.0.8…