As more and more of you buy Plus, we’re ploughing ahead with big upgrades to GTDInbox. Let me first say thank you for your early support, it has – and continues to – make all the difference.
With the thank you I must follow with a brief apology – perhaps more an expectation setting… I’ve fallen a little behind with support emails in the last week, and I’m turning to them now. At the moment I’m doing all the development, so it’s a trade off between pushing on with new features for the majority who have no problems, and solving the remaining glitches for those who need it. For the first 3 months of the year we were 100% focused on bug solving, but I believe we’ve reached a point where we can focus on increased utility. When we take on an additional developer – which is a priority! – it will become far easier to handle support and new feature development simultaneously.
New Feature: New Reviews Sidebar
This is a huge stride forward. Perhaps the biggest leap yet for a manageable email system. The first thing you will notice is Pete’s inspired new crisp & professional design. And then…
Pinning Items to the Sidebar
For each section (Statuses, Projects, Contexts, etc.) you can now pin your favourite labels to the sidebar, for constant ‘at a glance’ overview. For example, I’ve pinned S/Next, S/Waiting On, and P/Issues in support to give me both a sense of what must be done, and a constant nudge to do it.
True Nested Labels
We’ve always had an incomplete implementation of nested labels, where the labels were visually displayed in a hierarchy, but did not behave as one. As of today, when you click a parent label, it shows you that label and all its children. For example, if you have (P/Project, P/Project/SubProject1, P/Project/SubProject2), and you want to see all actions for P/Project, it will show you actions for the Project and all it’s children: “label:s-action (label-p-project OR label-p-project-subproject1 OR label-p-project-subproject2)”.
Drilling into Details with the Search Builder Menus
We’ve turbo-charged the sidebar most significantly with drilling. Now you can click any label, and continue to dig into it until you’ve created exactly the view you want. Perhaps you will start with P/Project, then select C/Call, and then selecct S/Action to see all call actions that must be taken for the Project; whatever you need, it’s intuitive and it’s easy.
The Big Surprise! Deadline/Schedule Emails (GTDInbox Plus)
This has much an oft-requested feature, and I always believed it would make a significant difference to email management, but I’ve been taken aback by just how much of a qualitative difference it makes to a sense of control. I don’t think we’ve perfected it yet, but the core elements are in place. I’d love your feedback on it.
How does it work? Any conversation can now be given a deadline. There are buttons in the conversation’s GTDInbox Action Box, and a new ‘Schedule’ dropdown button above the inbox/search-results/conversation (to the right of ‘Labels’).
It fits into the new Reviews Sidebar, so you can see ‘Today’, ‘Tomorrow’, ‘Upcoming’ and ‘Overdue’ items.
If you’d like to try it, please support us and Buy Plus.
Other Thoughts & Notes
This update is not being pushed to everyone just yet. It’s for volunteers only. We believe it’s stable (in fact more stable than the last release, but we’re keen to get your feedback on the feature improvements from you – our core users).
Two weeks into the Chrome version of GTDInbox, and I’m completely hooked. It pains me to return to Firefox, it’s that good. It’s now taken over as our primary development environment, and we then test it on Firefox prior to release.
We’ve finally settled on a rebrand, that we hope to take live in the next few days. More on that when it’s ready, but I will say in advance that I hugely appreciated all your suggestions at the end of last year; they were vital to forming an opinion.
I’m now returning to support to focus on any remaining glitches, expect some service releases by the end of the week.
Installing 3.0.22.3 3.0.22.6
Firefox: http://www.gtdinbox.com/gtdinbox_3-0-22-6.xpi
Chrome: http://www.gtdinbox.com/gtdinbox_3-0-22-6.crx
(Important note: please uninstall the previous version of GTDInbox before installing this new one).
If Install isn’t smooth, please download the file to your computer, and open it with your browser… normal addon installation will then start.
Update #1
Uploaded 3.0.22.2 to add additional debug information to some of the error reports you’ve been sending (and to fix the bugs we could identify). Hopefully, 3.0.22.2 will give us the error details we need to fix the remaining issues.
Update #2
3.0.22.3 fixes a conflict with Java6 that many of you were suffering from, fixes the Archive button in conversation (as discovered by Jason below), and adds even more debug information.
Update #3
3.0.22.4 is detailed in the latest blog post, http://blog.gtdinbox.com/2010/04/20/gtdnbox-3-0-22-4-please-update/