I occassionally receive emails enquiring about why we’ve slipped behind schedule or asking when will a feature appear. Perfectly valid questions, but I thought it might help everyone’s understanding if I shared a little of how we’re set up and how we work.

First though, that wasn’t actually a complaint. Most bug fixes and lots of great feature ideas all started with the emails you send, they’re the life blood of what GTDInbox is trying to achieve. So please, don’t stop

I will omit our history for sake of brevity, other than to mention that for the first 2 and half years GTDInbox was very much a sideline project maintained only when I could whereas now (as of early 2009) it’s my sole focus.

The company that will support GTDInbox is The Inbox Foundry Ltd, and that was incorporated about 2 weeks ago. Who is The Inbox Foundry? Well, right now it is Pete – the guy behind all the great designs GTDInbox now has – and I. I work on GTDInbox fulltime, and Pete works when he can. Stephen – who is the coding guru responsible for the very powerful framework that GTDInbox is now (as of 3.0) built on, is employed elsewhere but will hopefully be taking the framework to its fullest potential in the future.

And that is it! 1 full time and 2 contributors. I hope this explains why progress is sometimes a little patchy This was especially true for the first few months, where all our efforts were on rebuilding from scratch; and it has taken all that time just to get things to a ‘basic releaseable’. We’re gradually moving beyond that now, but I’m still bogged down in all the non-product details that must be done to get to launch (website, support, business misc, promotion, etc.).

A typical day might include bug fixing, new product development, refactoring to keep the codebase clean (which is vital with such a small team – complexity spells product death), copy writing, email answering, UI designing, product planning, marketing planning and countless more little chores. Although for the sake of sanity I do try and break the days up into one or two areas of concentration.

All of this raises the question of what drives me/us. If I’m candid, the product development is undeniably hard (in view of our resources), and the uncertainty involved does weigh heavily (is the next feature a good idea, will Google clone us, can we break through). Fortunately, there is an answer – and that is ‘great possibilities’. I love what we’ve already done, and even more so the blank canvas of what is still doable. That alone would be fun; but even better it has value – email is such a sorepoint for so many of us that it’s just plain satisfying to work towards improving it.

Actually on the subject of the blank canvas, the coolest thing of all is how GTDInbox is built. We have a very firm vision of the workflow we want to put in Gmail; but here’s the great bit: the interesting features are not limited by what we want to build. GTDInbox now makes Gmail plugin-development very easy, so anyone competent with coding can extend the functionality without clogging up the core product. I have no idea what will be created, but I am confident it will be new and exciting – because frankly, email has plenty of scope for it (interpret that how you will!).

I’m conscious of talking too much here, so I hope this little overview is enough to give you some insight into the team and goals behind GTDInbox. If you have any specific questions, fire away in the comments!

It is time for a little catch up on GTDInbox’s product development and how it’s being scheduled.

The top priority right now is to reduce the complexity in how GTDInbox is distributed. We have Mozilla serving a rapidly aging 2.x product, 3.0 is being pushed only on the blog, the main website is out of date, the new website is not yet right; and the forum is frankly a free for all

Before we can fully make 2.x obsolete, we have to get 3.0 ready for the mainstream – which means hitting Beta. That includes adding Preferences in, bringing back 80% of the features 2.x had, and adding in sufficient help that a beginner can get started.

Once that is launched, it will be trivial to update the website. So, we will have one product, one website, a new kind of forum (the old forum will remain, but will not be actively promoted) and a far easier time releasing new features!

I hope we’ll be at this point sometime next week.

After that, the next product goals are roughly:

* Improve the UI and Workflow (mainly improving interaction and reducing space usage)

* Add additional ways to filter and order threads

* Add Pre-Compose labels back in

* Add a ‘Related’ button

That should take us through to sometime in July!

This is not really a complete update, but I know a few of you are waiting on some critical changes, so here goes!

1) It now works with the new Release Candidate 2 of Firefox 3.5.

2) There is a fix to several labels bugs, some of which were causing crashes (although I urge to add, no damage).

3) The UI has been visually tweaked to be slightly easier to read.

Grab it from http://www.gtdinbox.com/3/Another blog post will follow to share our upcoming plans, and expect the next alpha release by the end of the week.

We’ve added the a new Box on Gmail’s navigation bar to serve as GTDInbox’s “home” within Gmail. There are a few glitches with it and the design is lacking in places, but I wanted to show you where we’re heading. I expect we will add ‘Recent Contacts’ and ‘Recent Threads’ to this too.

Get over to http://www.gtdinbox.com/3/ now to install GTDInbox 3.0 Alpha 7.

In the next release, expect a more refined Box and some visual tweaks that Pete is doing!

Thank you to everyone who has commented on the last two posts with feedback on their problems – it was a really great response that has helped identify a few more bugs (whether we’ve really got it right remains to be seen with this release!).

Particular mention goes to Leo Soto who was the first to identify one of the major bugs, and then managed to dig into the code to find a solution.

I also have another reason to be quietly optimistic about this release – Stephen has just finished his major update to the loading framework. As the errors you reported were during the loading process, I am hopeful that his improvements will have fixed them.

So let’s find out shall we?

Get over to http://www.gtdinbox.com/3/ now to install GTDInbox 3.0 Alpha 6

(As ever, please continue to report below problems – or successes! – as you see them).

Update: Realised shortly after pushing Alpha 5 that I’d left in a very embarrassing glitch! Just updated it, and it’s now available on the website.

For some people GTDInbox is refusing to load, but frustratingly, it’s working here.

The good news is, the 3.0 Alpha’s all spit out debugging information, so we may be able to catch the problem.

If you are running GTDInbox 3.0 Alpha 4 and it will not load, you can help! It’s quite easy I promise

1) Close Gmail tabs

2) Open Firefox’s Error Console (in the Tools menu)

3) In the Error Console, move to the ‘Messages’ tab/button

4) Click Clear to clear the Messages list

5) Go back to the Firefox window, and open Gmail (and log in)

6) Switch back to the Messages list in Error Console. You should start seeing debugging information from GTDInbox.

In normal circumstances, there will be quite a lot. Fortunately, there is only one type of thing you need to look for (and if it’s crashing, there will be much less debugging output as it will stop after the error).

An error will be on multiple lines (one of the only messages that is), and it will have line numbers and stack trace information. This should make it easy to spot in a quick scan.

An example (sent by Leo before), is:

Error in glNavBar: Could not find mainBucketsContainer nodeStack trace:Exception thrown(”Could not find mainBucketsContainer node”,”glNavBar”)@chrome://gtdinbox/content/js/util/debug.js:110([object Object])@chrome://gtdinbox/content/js/gmail/ui/glNavBar.js:73

If you can see anything like this in the Messages list, please add it to the comments.  Once we can diagnose the problem it should be quick to fix.

GTDInbox 3.0 Alpha 4 is available at http://www.gtdinbox.com/3/

It is mostly performance and robustness improvements, but does include a visual modification to Archive/Move-Next; and how it scrolls through emails in your Inbox and other views. The other major area we tackled was getting it to load at all – quite a few users were simply not seeing anything. I believe this is to do with other extensions in Firefox (it’s not their fault though – just a clash), and I hope we’ve now fixed it. (Please reply here if we haven’t!).

We’re going to get back to a cycle of rapid releases. There was a big gap between Alpha 3 and Alpha 4. There were several reasons for this – mostly to do with ambition and hard-to-find technical problems. To stop it happening again we’re implementing a rule that nothing new gets built until existing bugs are solved.

For the next release (probably Alpha 5), Stephen has been working on a new and improved framework for loading GTDInbox and handling future plugins. Meanwhile Pete & I have been designing visual and usability advances that are now ready to implement. If that all goes well, we’ll be into the Beta releases!