It would be wrong to start this post without a brief bout of personal recrimination – this release is hugely overdue, blowing our weekly releases out of the water. It started simply enough, but this snowballed into a complete rewrite of our Popup (which itself represents a major part of GTDInbox) and, well, nearly three weeks later here we are!
So what has the Popup rewrite yielded? For starters, its faster – it should appear quicker, change tabs more seamlessly and scroll more smoothly. There is now ‘Group By’ buttons to group threads by Project, Context, Contact and List. And perhaps most importantly of all (not to mention one of the most requested features), you can now resize the Popup. It sounds minor, but so far it’s had a big impact on usability. (Less interestingly, the whole thing is now much more expandable for the future).
The Sidebar box has changed too. It’s a lot tidier, thanks to Pete’s handy work, the Statuses have been replaced with ‘Views’ (e.g. Tasks To Do, Waiting On, Some Day), and Label Categories have a better visual indication of what needs your attention. Following the discussion in the last blog post (http://blog.gtdinbox.com/2009/08/07/design-discussion-labels-on-sidebar/), it’s also more stable – it needs a click to appear, and it stays there until you click it off.
Finally – and this is just a little nod to a big irritation of mine – the new Gmail ‘Recent Labels’ (the one that pushes everything in the sidebar down), can now be hidden; to save lots of space.
As this is a big change, I’m playing it a little cautious – it will be on the blog for a day or two before I push it to Mozilla. We’re also about ready to enter Beta status – if this release goes okay, we’ll move up to the next level.
http://www.gtdinbox.com/gettingstarted.htm
** Update Thur 27th August **
Okay, it would appear that there are problems for lots of you 
As far as I can work out, the major ones appear to be interference with/from Java QuickStarter (jqs@sun.com), a failure to load until you change view (e.g. click a label), and the X selecting everything… plus some smaller usability issues (which should be a quick fix).
If anyone can help – either by screenshare, or just talking me through what they’re seeing, please drop me an email (andy@gtdinbox.com) and let’s get this fixed.
Bug:
Make the dashboard pop up, click the X. Suddenly you’re highlighting everything
Another: Clicking the ‘Options’ button from the sidebar brings up the Preferences pane twice.
Clicking the gtdinbox blog button on sidebar gets me two blog tabs.
Also, was the functionality of “Today” or “Next Action” removed from the Quick Views on the sidebar? It’s missing now
It also doesn’t look like the “Toggle Visibility of Gmails Recent Labels” checkbox does anything. I’ve unchecked it, and I still see the recent tags
Scratch the ‘Recent Labels’ bit. It’s working now – must have just been Gears or something
Not working for me. When I hit the overview link nothing happens. Also, under quick views I have three links for jqs@sun.com Clicking on them does nothing. Hitting the box with the arrow doesn’t bring up any dashboard.
Same issue. What specifically did you do java-wise to make this go away?
jqs@sun.com is stalking me too…
Same issue
OK, disabled the java quickstart and it seems to at least work. Now need to test it some.
It doesn’t work on IE6 at all. Do you hate Microsoft?
GTDInbox is a FireFox extension…
So, who is jgs@sun.com?
Hi, thanks for the major update, it really looks slick! The ‘group by’ buttons are indeed very helpful.
One major problem for me, though; I have two non-standard statuses S/Reference and S/Cancelled, and items carrying these labels also show up as Todos. This really clutters up the results for me and makes it unusable. It would be great if we could choose which Status labels are considered as Todos.
Secondly, instead of having two separate Views ie Overview and To Do, we could have just one Dashboard, wherein we could select through checkboxes which of the Statuses get displayed. For eg, we could choose only to display the Next Actions, or only Actions, or both Actions and Some Day, etc. There could be a refresh button to refresh the view once a different set of statuses are selected. Combined with the ‘group by’ buttons, this would be awesome. (Additonally, you could add a ‘group by’ button for the Statuses also).
best regards,
Narasimhan
I get a ‘GTDInbox is unable to load correctly’ error, with a popup text of -
“Error during gtdMainPagePlugin load: TypeError: el is null’.
Also, why did ‘Finish and go to next’ get the chop?
Please bring back Finish and Finish go Next!
I can’t get the update to work at all. Using latest FF 3.5. Tried multiple ways to see the popup overview (which I assume is fantastic) with no luck.
Rolling back..
Andy,
Alpha 17 is artwork! Pure and simple. yes there appear to be a lot of pesky bugs but you have hit a home run as to the interface. I immediately dragged GTDInbox sidebar up to just below GMail contacts, Google Calendar is below GTDinbox and everything is visible without scrolling. GTDInbox is remembering where I was and what was collapsed or open. All the other side bar functions are available if and when I want them, but collapsed when I don’t. I even applaud your purity of heart by allowing even the GTDInbox links to be holdable. It is minimalist real estate with maximum function balanced on a knife edge. Congratulations!
May I vote that bug fixes become the priority until they are all squashed flat before you change anything significant. This will give everybody the opportunity to give this paradyne an honest assessment before making any serious adjustments requests.
Speaking of bugs please be aware that attempting to click on either the vertical or horizontal scroll bar in the label browser closes the drop down list of labels. They work fine with the scroll wheel but.
Truly artwork. Please keep up the work. Sincerely Alan Hart
GTDInbox is loading intermittently. (Okay, it loaded once!) Here’s the error:
Error in giPageManager: Error during plugin shutdown:
TypeError: this.labelsData is null
Stack trace:
Exception thrown
([object PageTransitionEvent])@chrome://gtdinbox/content/js/core/giPageManager.js:147
If I view existing labels, it sporadically causes GTDInbox to load. I’ll post back if I can nail it down to a more specific action. I have all labels hidden except for the inbox. I’m not sure if that has anything to do with it.
Andy,
The Show in Gmail stopped working?? A work around is to first show in the label browser then use the Show in Gmail button that’s on top of the label browser. I’m pretty sure it was working so I’ll try to nail down what I did that broke it.
Sincerely Alan
P.S. Is there any background processing of the Statuses in the label browser or will it always require selecting each status to remove the ? mark and get a current read of how many of the current sort are in each status?
P.P.S. You know the Label Browser is so functional I’m tempted to recomend that it should be the default view. Show in gmail can be the tiny button on the far right of each label and clicking anywhere else on the label should bring up the label browser. (Especially if going straight to Show in Gmail without first going to Show in Label Browser stays broken for me)
P.P.P.S. In a previous post today I applauded you for allowing the GTDInbox links to be “Holdable”. I meant foldable. Although this entire project should be held close to the heart.
It works almost ok (except for the first issue -clicking on X select everything-) on one machine (FF3.5), improvements are great. But I have lot of problems on another machine (almost same environment and settings of the first: Win XP Pro, FF 3.5.2, Offline disabled):
- in the Overview, I have “Overview”, but I have “jqs@sun.com” for 3 times instead of “To Do”, “Waiting”, etc
- clickin on Overview does not call the popup
- the Label Categories are present but no popup comes up when I click on them
- message preview sometimes works sometimes is blank.
Thanks in advance,
Ste
Haven’t had a lot of time to play with the new version yet, I will send some more notes later — just wanted to add my vote to “Please bring back Finish and Finish go Next!” — I already miss the Finish > buttons. I can respect that some people would prefer to have Finish over where the rest of the actions are, could we keep it there and add the arrow to it for “go to next”
Alpha 18 installed, it solved the “closing the dashboard selects all” issue. But when I perform a search, or access e.g. the Sent Mail “folder”, the searched rows have a large blank space at the beginning (between the star and the Sender). The same if I click e.g. on “To Do” to go to the list inside gmail.
Today “Compose Personal” became plain text, not a link. I tried updating to 3.0a18 (I think I was on a14 before that), no change.
The text is unformatted (black, default font) and appears UNDER the “recent labels” UI area, just above “contacts”.
Am also having this problem
Same issue with “Compose personal” here.
I have the same problem with Compose personal as well
me too re compuse personal
Thank you for this fantastic piece of software. I know you get no advanced warning when GMail changes, so it’s particularly impressive that you can keep GTDInbox going so effectively. It has dramatically improved the way I work and I can’t thank you enough for that. I look forward to some Pro options so I can support your work financially.
Andy, thanks for your great effort!
I noticed a problem in “Preview in Popup”:
In the popup window, the message’s titles in Chinese characters (UTF-8 encoding) always turns to unrecognized ones, while the message body remains correct.
I also have the problem with ‘compose personal’
I really appreciate your work…this is an indispensable addon!
I am also having this problem with the current Alpha release, where the GTD options do not load until view is changed. Please feel free to contact me directly to work on troubleshooting.
I’d like to add my vote for bringing back the finish button. Thx.