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GTDInbox 3.0 Alpha 12

As this is another update of a “million little bits”, I’ll spare you the tedious details and just focus on the big changes :)

Clearly we didn’t go far enough with space minimisation (is that a word?) last time, and so the big + button on the Labelling Box – which I loved btw ;) – has gone. It has been replaced by moving the dropdown boxes into a single row (those dropdown boxes now also need less clicks to make them disappear). Eran Kutner deserves the thanks for suggesting it! I suspect we’ve still not pleased everyone with this, and I hope in a future release to restore the style of inline labels that GTDInbox 2 once had. On the back of recent blog comments, I also made it possible to minimise individual parts of the Sidebar to reduce space.

It turns out it’s much more complicated than I anticipated to make the Popup resizable, so that has been pushed back for a future release. In the meantime, I took a best guess and reduced its height but increased its width.

Okay, this is where it gets potentially funky… bear with me! In the Popup, I removed the header that allowed filtering of Next Actions, Actions, Personal, etc. While it had a purpose, it was not intuitive and it took up valuable space. There are plans afoot to bring similar functionality back, but with a (hopefully!) better interface.

On the sidebar, the way the links worked have been refined (several people asked for this) – the main link now opens in Gmail and includes only active emails. The ‘popout’ icon now opens the Popup. This is also more consistent with Gmail.

In response to Bill in the last blog comments, the ability to have multiple statuses at once is now an option. And in response to Jack Nelson on UserVoice with a very neat point, in the Popup, if you preview a thread and then click Back, it remembers where you were in the list of emails. And thanks to Glen Norris, a major bug with the Options screen was fixed. And before I forget – the Esc key now closes the Popup (about time!).

Oh and Pete deserves a big thanks too – my changes were starting to make it look a bit, well, rubbish – and Pete managed to draw his craftman’s eye over it before this release.

As per usual, get it from http://www.gtdinbox.com/3/ (and refresh the page if you don’t see A12).

More to come next week… including a new website and maybe even a public release!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009 at 6:33 pm and is filed under Misc. 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.

  • Alex Gold

    Got options now in Flock – great stuff!

    Also like the 1 line for Status – Context – Reference etc, rather than the box taking up half the screen :)

  • http://sustainablejudaism.blogspot.com Daniel

    Hey – is there some explanation somewhere of how to set up concatenated labels? eg. P/project1/stage1, /stage2, etc.? I can’t figure that out – or did I just figure it out? Do I have to rename all my levels?

  • Andy

    Daniel — That’s exactly right, the magic lies in the forward slashes – so yes, renaming is order of the day.

  • Clinton

    Hi,

    the preview mail icons in both Alpha 11 and 12 don’t work on my systems. I cannot left click on the magnify glass icon and have anything happen. I cannot right click on the subject line and have the preview box appear.

    I have tried disabling all addins except the GTD one and no luck.

    I have gone back to Alpha 10 to get them to work.

    This was tested on two different computers both running Vista. Both running firefox 3.5.1

  • Andy

    Clinton – that sounds like a definite bug. I’ll drop you an email, but could you follow the instructions at http://productivefirefox.com/2009/06/09/gtdinbox-failing-to-load-can-you-help/ and watch the Error Console when you click the preview icon?

  • Eran Kuner

    Perfect!
    Thanks for hearing us, and thanks for the credit although I doubt I deserve it, I believe something similar was suggested by others as well.

  • http://www.peytonstafford.com Peyton Stafford

    Hi Andy,

    This is a big improvement. Two suggestions, though.

    1. The dates of the emails don’t always show up in the pop-up. For instance, I was just going through a project that has been delayed. I wanted to look at emails labeled for action and close the ones that are too old to do anything with, now that the project has been revived. So, I needed to be able to see the dates of the emails as I went through them in the pop-up.

    2. I use a lot of labels on some emails to tell me which projects they are part of. For instance, I might label one with a project and two sub-projects plus a context and a sub-context. I need to be able to see all these in the pop-up. Maybe if you added the old hybrid option in the labels, that would solve this problem.

    Thanks, again,

    Best,

    Peyton

  • Andy

    Hi Peyton,

    Wonderful feedback.. the date thing is evidently a bug – could you send me a screenshot?

    As for the labels… it’s something I’d like to solve. To give some background, I originally dropped the ‘bulky message’ format in the early alphas for two reasons; 1) they simply took up a lot of vertical space, 2) they were unlike Gmail, and thus potentially confusing. And it is number two that is the real killer.

    But I agree with you, labels are vital and their proper representation is a major issue.

    A. We could make it so that if you click on (or mouse over) a row, it opens up to show more information (i.e. all labels); but that does not help scanability.

    B. We could make the Popup even wider, and simply hope it will fill enough space (but this is unlikely to solve it, as I guess you have some pretty long labels).

    C. We could drop the star (which I don’t think is popular), and the ‘Open In Gmail’ button (until it is mouse-over’d); as well as any reference to ‘me’ (which will slow rendering down, unfortunately).

    D. Or we could take a risk, and put things on two rows; maybe shrinking the text.

    I suspect A or D are the best; and it’s a trade off between convention and scanability.

    It would be great to understand a little more about how you use it… (and everyone else!)

  • Andy

    You know, A might have legs. So, as you move your mose over a row, a popup automatically appears directly below the subject line with the labels; and as you move your mouse down it moves the popup (so it is semi-scannable).

    On the normal row itself, it would show 1S, 2P, 1C (1 status, 2 projects, 1 context).

  • http://www.peytonstafford.com Peyton Stafford

    I just sent you some screen shots via email.

    A. This might handle it.

    B. The pop-up could be as large as needed, since when it is open you can’t really do anything else on the screen.

    C. The star seems to duplicate the function of a S/Today label, so it could be dropped. The Open in Gmail button doesn’t usually work for me. It says the conversation cannot be found when I click on it, and the search box shows p-. Please don’t do anything to slow down rendering. It is finally fast enough with this release.

    D. This could work, too. If you made the whole box larger, then there would be more room for the labels.

    Best,

    Peyton

  • Jack Nelson

    I am having hangs with Firefox 3.5.1 and GTDInbox 3 alpha 12, Vista 32 SP2, java 6 update 13. Whenever I try to set a label from the dropdown box which is a nested one, a sublevel, Firefox hangs, CPU to 100%, memory fills up (2Gig) rapidly. Anybody else?

  • Jack Nelson

    I think the previous message by me was due to a corrupted profile, as when I switched to a different one the problem went away, at least for now.

  • http://www.gtdinbox.com Andy

    Jack – keep me posted if anything like that happens again. I’ve not heard of it before, but that would be a severe bug if GTDInbox is behind it.

  • Jack Nelson

    It turns out to be a Norton Toolbar 4.0 issue; that was loaded when I installed Norton Internet Security 2010 Beta yesterday. The problem is well known on the Norton Beta forum: http://community.norton.com/norton/board/message?board.id=nis2010_pb&message.id=1461&query.id=584187#M1461

    Disabling that addon makes things work properly again. There is no uninstall for it.

  • Marc

    Andy,
    One line drop down boxes
    Option to avoid pop-up
    big steps in the right direction, congrats!
    Now you still need to do away with these huge 2001-style buttons, and you’re there!

  • dr

    I don’t mind the buttons, personally. Granted, I run in a really high resolution, so it’s not that much of an issue. I like the simplicity of everything.

    Great work guys, giant leaps in the right direction.

  • craig

    Nice, I was just coming to find out how to avoid the Dashboard when clicking Next/Action/ etc and I see this version loads the tasks into gmail itself.

    I noticed when I click a Project on the Navbar, it only displays entries that have Next/Action/Waiting On/Some Day label. Often I want to see an entire project’s data – most of which does not have a task priority assigned to it. Can this be changed?

  • http://www.gtdinbox.com AndyM

    Hi Craig,

    On the Projects popout (on the Sidebar), you should see a little square icon next to the label name – if you click this, it will show you all items (not filtered to a Status) for that label. Is that what you were after?

    Andy

    • Jack Nelson

      I suppose it is hard to take snapshots of these details, but it would be helpful to have a consistent terminology (for words such as “Projects popout” “Sidebar”, etc.) in these discussions. I am happy with the product, especially as it is developing, so this is a documentation issue really.

  • craig

    Ah yes, I see that works, cool.

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