ActiveInbox: Make your Inbox your Donebox

Take Note! Here’s ActiveInbox 4 Alpha 5 (with Firefox too!)

Introducing Notes

Okay, this is the big one! We can now add our own notes to each and every single conversation in Gmail. What does that mean? You can store next actions, links to calendar events, links to related emails or private notes that will help drive the conversation towards your goal.

It’s as simple as either clicking the edit icon, or double clicking the text box (both to the right of the ‘Notes’ label) to enter your note.

And, when you view the ‘Active Results’ for any search, the first line of the notes are shown! This makes it very useful if you develop the habit of using the first line of your note to show next actions (think of it as a better subject line).

One draw back: the note is stored on our servers, and you cannot yet access the note when you’re not using ActiveInbox. We’re thinking about ways of doing this… either by having a separate web interface (so you can access it anywhere), or possibly by storing the note as an email in the conversation.

The Projects View

You no longer need to just rely on a view of ‘Top Priority’ or ‘To Do’ to drive your reviews.

You can now click ‘Projects’ in the sidebar to get a list of all projects in use, and instantly see active conversations within each.

Firefox Support

We finally did it! All future releases of ActiveInbox 4 will work on Firefox as well as Chrome.

Tidier ‘About’ Box

To bring ActiveInbox 4 back up to speed with a little improvement we made to V3, the ‘About’ box is hugely simplified & a lot sleeker: it’s now just News, Support, Account & Preferences.

Warning! It Is Not Very Pretty

One significant caveat is that Alpha 5 isn’t very pretty. I have focused on trying out new features with the hopes of getting your very early feedback. If we get the greenlight, Pete will start making it beautiful

Bits and Pieces

I tried to fix as many bugs you found as possible:

Thank you once again to the hugely helpful & much appreciated Daniel Griffiths for helping me fix a bug where the prefs dropdown appeared off the screen.
Annoying tooltips have been removed from the sidebar
On a Monday, clicking ‘Start of Next Week’ will actually be next week now

What’s Next?

Unless there are any urgent demands:

Alpha 6 will include working ‘Older’/'Newer’ links in conversations linked to from ‘To Do’ and ‘Projects’; as well as the HAB in the ‘To Do’ view so you can change the status of emails using checkboxes.
Alpha 7 will prettify and refine what we have.
Alpha 8 will be dedicated to ‘Focus Mode’ which I hope to discuss very soon

Install

You can now go to www.activeinboxhq.com/install_v4.html to grab the latest version (although it should auto update if you were already using a V4 alpha).

Rob Harrington

Looking good Andy -

After entering my first note – I clicked actions to see my note but AIB pane returned no results while the gmail pane showed 4 emails. I clicked around on a few other things, then came back and it was OK – strange, but since I can’t reproduce it, no sense chasing ghosts. I will keep ‘experimenting’

Thank you for fixing start of next week bug – I just confirmed it works for me now.

I still have 2 outstanding requests – 1 I think you were going to add, the other is our ongoing discussion.

1. remove context labels when clicking the ‘finish’ status
2. reapply all labels when replying to an email. (to resolve gmail sorting bug)

Keep up the good work!

http://www.activeinboxhq.com Andy Mitchell

Thanks Rob – I’m REALLY enjoying development at the mo, mostly because this is the most rapid release cycle I’ve ever managed, and the frequent conversations that sparks with the community are great for motivation

Keep an eye on ‘Actions’ issue and see if it returns.

#1 is on my list (but I really wanted to get Alpha 5 out in the open – I was aiming for last Wednesday!), and #2 is, I think – thanks to your thoughts about only updating on Send – doable, but a little further out due to its complexity.

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=503347368 Dale Holden

Andy not sure if it is possible down the line but the notes is a pure stepping stone as i see it. If you had the tools of dropping in dates and labels and users into notes that would expand its use immeasurable.
Just a thought but if i had an email about Project A that need actions from 2 people i would add noted users and time and dates for review. Takes it from a single entity to a more powerful tool.

http://www.facebook.com/mikeburke Mike Burke

Getting this same issue but also having problems with it being reproducible. Can I get screenshots or maybe pull something out of Firebug if that would help?

Also the ‘quick preference’ gear icon on the HAB generates a modal that is off the screen to the right.

Anonymous

I swear I fixed that… Firefox or Chrome?

http://www.facebook.com/mikeburke Mike Burke

Chromium 9.0.597.84 (72991) Ubuntu 10.10

http://ghost1227.com Dan Griffiths

Have you tried the alternate solution I posted in my last comment?
http://www.facebook.com/mikeburke Mike Burke

Hey Dan – sorry, didn’t see that last comment until just now, as I had the tab open for a while without refreshing. I’m a web developer/designer as well so I know all too well how nasty Chrome can be to deal with when changing CSS. I did close out the process, clear cache / etc – even fired it up on a different development PC (Win7 with Chrome 9.0.597.86). Same issue on all.
http://ghost1227.com Dan Griffiths

Andy posted the solution in reply to your initial post… Seems he forgot to include my patch! Oh well, it’ll be included in the next build. If you absolutely have to have it now I can send you a patched copy.
http://www.facebook.com/mikeburke Mike Burke

No rush at all, in fact I only noticed it because I was clicking around trying to find broken CSS – just trying to help you guys close out bugs where possible

http://www.activeinboxhq.com Andy Mitchell

Hi Mike,

I thought I’d fixed it, but I’ve just realised I didn’t include Dan’s patch. It’ll be done in Alpha 6!

Dan Griffiths

Development is rolling right along! The new notes feature is great, but there is one little thing that I think could be done better… the edit button.

As it stands, the edit button is displayed all the way on the right side when you mouseover the text area. While this works, it isn’t very noticeable and requires the user to move their mouse all the way to the right of the screen to edit an existing note. While it is possible to double click to edit notes, this frequently results in odd portions of the page being selected at random.

The attached image displays the current location of the edit button and a tweak that relocates the edit button to where I propose it be located.

Thoughts from the user base before we start making actual code changes?

Dan Griffiths

Forgot to attach the image…

http://ompldr.org/vN2J1dA
Pete

Thanks, Dan.

As I’ve been using notes myself this is something that has come to my attention. I intend to make Notes (and the Edit button) a lot more obvious, especially when the Notes field is empty. I haven’t done a very good job of this on the first pass.

Thanks for the feedback.

Aaron

Haven’t played with notes much yet. Not sure how I’ll end up using them most effectively.

I really like the search string ‘Projects:[name]+’ works. Not sure if this is new to alpha 5 or if it was in the previous but I’ve been waiting for this for a long time. Would be nice if it could hide s/finished , either by default or by an option in preferences.

Thanks for the great work, keep it up.

http://www.activeinboxhq.com Andy Mitchell

Hi Aaron,

It quietly appeared in Alpha 4, but thank you – you’re the first person to notice

http://ghost1227.com Dan Griffiths

…or at least the first to comment

http://www.google.com/profiles/henrik.bengtsson HenrikB

Hi and thanks for the new updates

A comment on the Notes feature quoting:

“One draw back: the note is stored on our servers, and you cannot yet access the note when you’re not using ActiveInbox. We’re thinking about ways of doing this… either by having a separate web interface (so you can access it anywhere), or possibly by storing the note as an email in the conversation.”

By introducing “Notes”, you have a few issues that you really have to consider:

1. Privacy: People trust Google to keep their data private when using Gmail. By adding a Note to a conversation, that Note is now stored on ActiveInbox servers. You private/confidential communication content is now leaking outside Gmail. That is not good. Also, by not adding Notes to email threads, will nothing be stored on the ActiveInbox server, or will there always be a place holder stored on that server even if Notes is empty? Then, will you be able to do *statistics* on when ones messages were read/replied to by looking at the data on the ActiveInbox server. Related to this, if the Notes are just stored, whouldn’t they just be garbage if accesses on your web servers without pairing them up with the messages?

2. Backup: What happens if the ActiveInbox server crashes severely resulting in loss of data or by other means damage the users data? Then the Notes are lost. Thus, if ActiveInbox plan to host Notes, ActiveInbox is also moving into a new business of storing data. Remember, at least one big online backup company screwed up and lost part of their customers data (and went out of business) – it’s a lot of responsibility added.

3. Robustness: What is the risk for a screw up? For instance, what is the risk for a bug in ActiveInbox causing the Note to be passed along/inserted by mistake in a future reply of the same thread? If you make sensitive notes to yourself about the person/company you’re emailing with, you’re certainly don’t want that to slip to them. Can I trust ActiveInbox not to do this? Storing Notes as part of the Gmail thread certainly opens up for such bugs. Nothing is bug free and one day when least expect it, this might happen. If it does, it will damage ActiveInbox reputation a lot!

Issues 1 and 2 do call for storing Notes on the users Google Account. Your mentioning to store it in Gmail part of the thread. Maybe a parallel private thread is a safer/better option. What about the other Google Account services – maybe there is other options?

I’m sure you’ve already though about this to some extent, but there is a lot and I think it is most important that this will be openly discussed. I’ve just my $0.02 to it.

Cheers,

Henrik

http://www.activeinboxhq.com Andy Mitchell

Hi Henrik,

You raise some very important questions.

I’m super tired right now (it’s 1am here!), so this is going to be quite brief, but let’s keeping discussing…

1) AIB stores each note against the conversation id (e.g. #inbox/12df2f2288183dbc in the address box), as well as the subject for future look ups if we provide our own web service. We do not store any conversation text, and nothing is stored if you don’t write a note.

2) We have nightly backups on our web server. This means that we should, at most, lose 24 hours of data if the worst happened. In the near future, I’ll look at more robust back up procedures. One option is Google itself, another is Amazon (which I hear good things about).

3) There is less risk of a logic screw up – ‘Reply To Self’ is quite dangerous for that; but a Note could never be accidently injected into a conversation.

So, I think once a better backup solution is taken care of, the most pressing problem is making Notes available where AIB isn’t!

http://www.google.com/profiles/henrik.bengtsson HenrikB

Hi.

1) Storing subject lines is a privacy issue – there’s lots of information in a subject line.
1a. What you’re going to store needs to be very clear.
1b. The user must be fully aware of this. I would vote for the user having to actively enabling this feature and/or sending/storing private data to your servers.
1c. There should be an easy option to complete delete any private data at any time.
1d. The above need to be very well tested.
1e. The above need to be part of the active design for all future releases.

2. What I wanted to say is that although it sounds easy, backup is tricky to guarantee at 100% (no one does). There are endless stories how bullet-proof systems failed in this sense. Even Amazon failed with where some power failure caused data loss for a (small) number of customs. Another classical one is where nightly backups of hard drives were made. Everything was perfectly backed up. The problem was that a crash in the file system caused all files to become empty while remaining valid (=0 bytes). When it was discovered, it was too late, because the history of the backups didn’t go far enough back and all of the backup contained empty files. The latter I heard in person from three different sysadms at different places over several years.

3. I hear you, but from experience I also know that there is no such thing as bug free software and here is a case where you have to consider the risk for Murphy’s Law applying because the cost is very high to mess up.

My main concern is about (1) where my data (with subject line) is stored on an external server. Adding a web interface makes it even more vulnerable. Instead, I think you should design your software and servers such that it will not be possible for you to access any users data what so ever.

Notes (and other types of private data) is better stored on the user’s own Google Account. That way you automatically solves (1) and (2). I see it as a win win.

Is there really a pressing need to make Notes available where AIB isn’t? To me that sounds like a very rare use case, or do you mean that people may access their Gmail on, say, a public computer and then realize that they really need those Notes as well?

Related, what is stored on AIB servers today for free and pro users?

/Henrik

M8R-4yy4bl

I wasn’t as concerned about this until I saw this version is sending subject lines and ids along with stored notes.

I would advise using this version until https is used for all communication between the extension and activeinbox. Currently it appears notes are read and written using http. The credentials are passed each time gmail is loaded or activeinbox needs to contact its server in such a way that they are repeatable (unsalted md5). For example, an appropriate plugin for firesheep could recover a username and password hash and then acquire all of the notes for a given account. Using TLS (https) would prevent this behavior and limit the reusable credential to an actual intrusion on the machine. The replayable credentials weren’t a huge deal until the notes issue.

Activeinbox should keep a default of sending no account data outside of gmail. Only if someone wants to use such functionality should information stored in gmail be exported to another service.

In short, use TLS for all communications in the plugin. Default to privacy friendly settings.

Alain

Hi Andy

I strongly suggest never to take content out of gmail. only concidering the privacy laws in each country you are going on very thin ice.

Why not simply store the note as a reply to self, omit the inbox and alter the UI for this message?

PS: Why I was actually comming here: Chrome does not save my preferences. I change S/ to A/ every time I start chrome new

Alan Schwartz

Installed 4.0.0.5 into my Firefox. When it asked for my Plus password to register, I got it wrong. The sidebar has now disappeared, and uninstalling and reinstalling either 4.0.0.5 or 3.1.6.5 doesn’t get it back for my main Gmail account (although it does appear in a google apps account that I haven’t registered for Plus). Help?

http://www.activeinboxhq.com Andy Mitchell

Hi Alan,

I’ve just dropped you an email with a solution – and it’ll be fixed properly in Alpha 6

Andy

Alan Schwartz

Thanks as always, Andy!

http://twitter.com/khuongduybui Duy K. Bui

As the Active View is getting more useful (especially with Notes) I’m thinking about making the To-Do Active View the starting point of my task management tab. However, it seems more natural for me to have Action, Waiting on, Some day, and Starred to belong in 1 group (tracking group) while Overdue, Today, Upcoming belong to the other group (deadline group). As of the current setting, I will get a duplicate in my To-Do view for tasks that I filed as action and later on set a deadline.

Another thing with the Active View is that can you give us the ability to choose how much of the notes to show in the Active View (for example: first line v.s. full), or better yet, a (+) button to see the full note section right in Active View.

And another thing, when I type the word “To-Do” in the search box and hit ENTER (instead of clicking on the Search button), the Active View does not show up. Meanwhile, if I enable the Apps search lab feature, neither hitting Enter or clicking on the Search button would trigger the Active View, I don’t even get the option to switch to Active View either. Just so you know, when I enable the Apps search lab feature, the search URL would be #apps/ instead of #search/

And yet another thing, when I type the following URL (without the spaces) in the address bar it doesn’t do what I want: “https:// mail . google . com / mail / #search / To-Do”. Instead, it searches for the word “to-do” in my emails.

PS: congratz on the update, I love it.

http://www.activeinboxhq.com Andy Mitchell

Hi Duy,

Wow – this is a tidal wave of things I didn’t know about or hadn’t yet thought about — wonderful!

So,
* In the future (several releases time), I think the views can become editable. So Top Priority could be deadline items; and To Do trackable items.
* Excellent idea for expanding Notes in the Active Results view
* I’ll look into making To-Do a very universal search term
* Thank you for the heads up on the Apps search lab – I’ll see if I can replicate it!

http://www.intershore.co.uk Richard

I’m excited about the new notes feature. I think the “next/finish/archive” button is addictive and makes getting thro the actions motivating, but it was hampered by not being able to store notes, so now this is becoming a real winner and I really want to switch back from Gtasks, but I can’t just yet, because:
1. I would like to be able to scan the notes like I can scan the subject lines of email (refer to previous blog comments)
2. The notes download a bit too slowly (pre-emptive download could help)

Given I don’t keep many tasks in Active Inbox at the mo, a fear of server crash is not a major issue.

On layout – I’d like the note to be more prominent, as it’s teh first thing I want to read. It’s good it’s located as is.
Double-clicking to add a note saves having to go to the far right button, so not too bad.

I do like keyboard shortcuts though!

Hope this helps,

Richard

http://www.activeinboxhq.com Andy Mitchell

Hi Richard,

1) The first line of each note appears in the Active Results view, underneath each thread. It’s not very pretty/obvious yet, but Pete will be able to make that really scannable.
2) It is pre-emptive!! The notes download when you log in, and should appear at the same time as the HAB loads… hmm, perhaps not actually. Let me investigate that!

And yes – I hear you on the prominence. Pete is itching to do some nice things with it

http://www.intershore.co.uk Richard

Unfortunately my Active Results view is not working. Don’t know why… e.g. under Next I get 4 conversations under Gmail Results, but nothing under Active Results. The Active Inbox box on the left indicates there should be 4 next conversations…

http://www.activeinboxhq.com Andy Mitchell

Hi Richard,

Could you send a screenshot of your Active Results? (Or whatever you see when you click ‘Top Priority’ on the side).

And without sounding too much like a cliched IT support guy, you might want to refresh Gmail too (“turn it off and on again”!)

http://www.intershore.co.uk Richard

Screen shot as per the link. Exiting and re-starting Chrome makes no difference.
http://screencast.com/t/qoNByBZt
http://www.activeinboxhq.com Andy Mitchell

Excellent, it’s a definite bug. I’m on it!
http://www.activeinboxhq.com Andy Mitchell

Hmm, that was a fleeting case of the bug… it’s not there anymore for me.

I can tell from the screenshot it’s definitely a glitch. If you mouseover ‘Support’ in the left hand sidebar, do you see a yellow box that has “X Warnings” (or “X Errors”) in it? If so, please send it to our servers and I’ll see if I can figure it out.
http://www.intershore.co.uk Richard

There were 6 errors. Sent as requested.
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=503347368 Dale Holden

Andy my dear friend Active Results is sha**ed i have 16 in my Waiting On but Active Results tab has a blue icon with zero result

Hermenute

We need an iPad app. All notes could then be stored locally.

http://ghost1227.com Dan Griffiths

We’ve had many discussions on developing iOS and Android apps. It’s on the list, but it’s not going to happen overnight. It would require developing a very robust app that would effectively replace existing Gmail/mail apps entirely, and we’re currently focusing on refining the actual extension.

Tom

Andy, this is quite brilliant. The first time I saw the Projects overview, I gasped! I may now even go to the trouble of having all my Projects list under my Responsibilities, leading to absolute drill-down from 20K to ground level. GTD heaven!
One thing for future refinements: how will you handle sublabels – lots of my projects have
[Project]/Reference and [Project]/Archive labels. Sad if they get their own place in the listing.

http://ghost1227.com Dan Griffiths

Sublabels work fine as far as I know… What problem are you having?

Tom Ravetz

In the Projects view, each sublabel appears as if it were a separate project, on its own line. Would be neater if they could fold out like in the sidebar view

http://ghost1227.com Dan Griffiths

Ok, but in the sidebar they work fine?

Tom Ravetz

yes

http://twitter.com/khuongduybui Duy K. Bui

My suggestion is to have separate labels for Project and Reference, so instead of having a single “#housekeeping/boss@phone” label you can have 3 labels “P/housekeeping”, “R/boss”, and “C/phone”. All solved.

Dirk Vos

I just wanted to let you know that this is a great update; adding notes makes it very fast to work through my mails ! Just make it look good and that’s it. It is a very simple functionality, but very powerful in working with GTD-mail ! Thanks a lot !!

Also PROJECTS are great, I really like it a lot. This version helps me again to gain another 15 minutes a day.

Dirk Vos
GTD-Gmail-fan

http://www.activeinboxhq.com Andy Mitchell

Dirk – that is so great to hear

And, I’m also interested in how to squeeze more minutes out the day… can I ask… in your workflow, what is it about AIB that saves you actual time?

(I think for me it’s reduced procrastination – being ‘on rails’, batch processing similar items, and just not having to worry about my email – knowing its out of my head and under control).

AlanLB

I would very much like to upgrade to ActiveInbox Plus, and start using v4…but I don’t understand how to do this I am currently using public version v3. Can you help me with this please? Regards, AlanLB.

http://ghost1227.com Dan Griffiths

What are you having trouble with?

AlanLB

Hello Dan, and thanks for responding. In previous postings I have seen that even if I upgrade to AIB+, I would not be able to use v4Alpha, and that I would have to take further steps. I am a bit confused as to what I should do to upgrade, and the order I should do it in. Can you help with this?

http://www.activeinboxhq.com Andy Mitchell

Hey Alan (and thanks Dan!),

It would be a pleasure to have you join us! You can grab a year’s Plus account by going to http://www.activeinboxhq.com/buy.html and following the process (you enter your Gmail/Google Apps email address).

Once your Gmail/Google-Apps account is registered as an ActiveInbox Plus account, you can just download V4 from http://www.activeinboxhq.com/install_v4.html.

When it’s installed, just click the ‘Register’ button in the AIB sidebar, and enter your ActiveInbox password (which you create when you buy a Plus account), and away you go!

If we can make it simpler, please do share your thoughts -> those sales keep the fire burning and the lights shining

http://ghost1227.com Dan Griffiths

Thanks for the shout out Andy (again). I believe that Alan is referring to the users who have reported issues resulting in a JSON error that have been plaguing the comments and forum the last day or two. If I’m incorrect, please feel free to ignore me However, the bug in question has since been fixed. As such, it is no longer something to be concerned about! In other words, if you want to support the project and get all the great features that come along with a Plus account, feel free!
AlanLB

Thanks for the “Idiots Guide” Andy

At some stage during the process, will I be directed to uninstall the AIB extension Version: 3.1.6.5 I am currently using?

I use Google Chrome browser v9.0.597.84 (Official Build 72991).

I will wit to hear from you; many thanks.
http://www.activeinboxhq.com Andy Mitchell

Ha ha, I’ve just ever fearful that a process that makes sense in my oddball head is completely illogical to anyone else

If you originally installed ActiveInbox from our website (and not Google’s Chrome Gallery), then yes, you can just install ActiveInbox 4 without uninstalling V3 – it will simply upgrade.

If you’re in any doubt though, you can safely uninstall V3 first.
AlanLB

Thanks again Andy…all very helpful

BTW, my ref to your “Idiots Guide” was meant to be a compliment/no sarcasm intended I assure you

I will go ahead and upgrade in the next day or so

All the best, AlanLB.
http://ghost1227.com Dan Griffiths

Oops, looks like Andy was spot on and I was somewhere out in left field. However, you got your answer and that’s what counts. In answer to your latest query, no. Chrome should handle the transition to 4.x in the same way it handles automatic updates… The new version should simply overwrite the old version.
AlanLB

Thanks for your help with this Dan; much appreciated. All the best, AlanLB.

http://twitter.com/niiloa niiloa

Notes looking very, very good! Haven’t had time to play with the latest release much yet but is it possible to add a (clickable) web links in the comments field? Would be handy and I’d guess that’s the way it should work but I might be missing something. I use Chrome beta, Vista and latest AIB release (surprise!)

http://ghost1227.com Dan Griffiths

AFAIK, there’s nothing in place to handle that, but adding a parser to it would be a pretty slick feature! Might have to put some effort into adding that!

http://twitter.com/foomanjee david robertson

The HAB is still defaulting to ‘archive’, and not ‘finish’ on actionable items. Maybe make the order customizable?

http://www.activeinboxhq.com Andy Mitchell

Hey David,

It’s on my list – in the next update, I’ll try a more nuclear option and reset that part of the preferences (buttons are actually a preference -> there’s just no way to control them!).

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=503347368 Dale Holden

Andy not sure if it is possible down the line but the notes is a pure stepping stone as i see it. If you had the tools of dropping in dates and labels and users into notes that would expand its use immeasurable.
Just a thought but if i had an email about Project A that need actions from 2 people i would add noted users and time and dates for review. Takes it from a single entity to a more powerful tool.

http://www.activeinboxhq.com Andy Mitchell

It’s an interesting thought, and I think we need to tackle collaboration at some point… but I think it’ll have to be a separate system (that can be tightly integrated with Gmail+AIB).

The reason I say that is email is top-bottom a single-user experience; and it’s very hard – and I think very confusing – to try and change that. But, having AIB make single-user more efficient and powerful; while effortlessly hooking people together with a neatly integrated separate system… well I’d be keen to see that!

Steve

I’m a big fan of everything you’ve done in this round! Love notes, how they work and also the new projects view. I look forward to seeing them prettied up.

With that said, I did find one thing that’s a bummer (for me) about the notes. The content typed into notes is not searchable in gmail. Serious bummer there because I am a heavy user of the search features in gmail for retrieving specific data. It would be really helpful if I could search for notes that I’ve typed in. I realize that notes is a separate app that is tied to your servers and not gmail, so I don’t even know if there is a solution to this, other than using the reply to self feature in the event that I want to be able to search on my own notes.
Ron

- I’m grateful for the notes. Seems like it will be a useful addition.
- I’ve never been enamored with the ActiveInbox popus or “results” view because they lack color. I rely on the label color to integrate results visually without effort (billable projects green, probono blue for example)… the AI results view requires more focused mental effort
- I use stars to indicate action (simple, visually attention-getting, eliminates a tag from the row of tags) and I need to focus on just one project at a time because my projects are billed to different clients (in fact, I created a Pro Bono category of projects (Q/) to distinguish billable projects from pro bono projects… that option seems a little unexecutable now).
So… it would be nice to be able to see all the starred emails for one project in the gmail results view. Formerly, I could get that result through the Projects (and ProBono) threads, but no longer.
- As it stands in this version, if I select the “top priority” stars, the default results come back in the “AI Results” window, with all 82 action messages sorted by Project (w/ all probono projects filed as misc). Its too much work to scroll down to that particular project I’m working on at the moment… stars aren’t shown (so I have to exit the view to change them).

Regret that I’m whining here… I know the team is putting a lot of thought into this project, but…

Ron

May have found a little bug here. When look through the context view & click on the action number, the results come back correctly. When I attempt to do the same thing in the projects view, I get ALL the messages in that project (not just the starred ones). I’m thinking the starred functionality is not quite right…

Yo Dee

How about:

1. a small button to add time-stamp to the notes
2. two small buttons to add bulleted or numbered lists to notes
http://www.facebook.com/sirmontegu Monte Martin

Hey guys, I really love the new update!!! Super excited to be able to view projects (contexts, etc.) sorted by status!

However, I am having a problem with the ‘top priority’ button since 4.0.0.5

It works great at first, but once I open an email from it I can’t click directly back to it. I have to go to a different label before returning to ‘top priority’. Then when I do return it doesn’t display all of my emails. It seems to randomly not display either the ‘today’ or ‘next’ list. It does have the blue dot to signal statused emails, but the view is empty. Once I refresh the page it is back to normal.

As you can guess this is wreaking havoc in my ability to trust my lists:) I am really looking forward to seeing all the kinks worked out of version 4 as it is a huge improvement over previous versions, and I can’t really think of much more that AIB is missing at this point. Keep up the good work.
Guilherme Reis

May be you can use “tasks” to create a notes list to store notes on google servers.
http://www.losethebackpain.com Healthy Back

What I would love to see and would be MOST HELPFUL is…

To be able to make the “Overdue” and “Today” searches show up in the “Multiple Inboxes” so they can be at the top of my inboxes…

Right now I have to use the Active Inbox widget in the left side bar to access those and that means you are less likely to return to the most important items – instead you return to the inbox and get distracted (again)…

If this is not possible, any other ideas or suggestions???
Tom Ravetz

Alpha 5 just lost all my preferencs, including custom label types, HAB setup etc!
Tom Ravetz

Alpha 5 in Chrome: active results lists show some empty counts next to labels that do have emails in them.

Yori

happened to me as well, multiple times, in most case reloading gmail solved it but it keeps happening intermittently.

http://www.facebook.com/sirmontegu Monte Martin

Hey, I am really loving AIB 4.0.0.5! Aside from the errors I am getting in the Active view (which have already been mentioned,) I have a few minor requests.

1. I know this is probably already in action, but can we get the notes in a different font in the active view? And maybe an option for a different color? I would really like to be able view them as distinct actions, but they just blend in and look like all the other poor subject lines.

2. Just an FYI as I plan to change my system for this anyways, I have been using a * to keep a folder of personal projects at the top of my list (P/*Personal/Project Name) and none of the action items are showing up for these projects in the project view.

3. Please bring back the option to have status buttons and labels on separate lines. The alignment changes between my laptop and monitor drive me crazy.

Keep up the great work!
http://www.s-consult.com Wayne Schulz

I am unsure if the new Google Extension for Content Farm Spam is the cause but my ActiveInbox shut down entirely right after loading the extension.
Freddy

Help please!
The status buttons don’t work at all. Whenever I click on one the native gmail label dropdown is activated. The ONLY way to add statuses is through the native gmail interface. The problem persists on both chrome and firefox…

any help is greatly apreciated

Freddy

Yo Dee

I am also facing the same issue since the past few hours. I tried switching to Firefox, but it’s the same. Is there some automatic update that happened? Can it be retracted by the dev’s pls?

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