In the very early hours of yesterday I released 4.0.2.18, which was just a very quick response to people having trouble with Send & Archive not showing projects.

There was a tremendously tip top suggestion in the comments to include a video detailing what’s changed with each new release, and I’ve added a note to my deployment process to always include either a video or screenshot if there’s a worthwhile improvement (4.0.2.18 probably wouldn’t have though, as it was just a simple bug fix).

Lisa & I are flying through support requests, and I’m hunting for problems to deal with and fix. As I go, I’m also trying to absorb the essence of the workflow improvements you’re requesting to synthesise them into product plans (picking up where May’s blog posts left off).

Tomorrow – Thursday – Andrea & I will be returning to building the brand new stability system to insulate ActiveInbox from the perilous shifting sands of Gmail. I’m nervous about that release, as it’s so huge, so it probably won’t appear until next week.

More soon!

Ok, I have a big bite of humble pie – 4.0.2.16 had a glitch in the calendar that affected some Plus users. Initially I thought we’d had unfortunate timing with a Gmail change, but – and it’s no excuse! – it turns out that because I was rushing to get it uploaded before I left the country on Friday, I didn’t spot the problem before it was too late. This is one of the things that Andrea’s new stability & testing system will instantly detect, so once it goes live in two weeks we won’t just be relying on me and me alone!

4.0.2.17 is now up and live at http://www.activeinboxhq.com/install.php.

Hi all,

Lisa is currently doing a tremendous job getting in touch with everyone and helping me prioritise what gets done.

But I’m only just getting up to speed… I’m just about back on top now. In the coming weeks & months I’ll be going as fast as possible to make amends to all.

I’ve just fixed the “Move Nexter” buttons (next to Archive/Finish/etc.), so they will be ready to swiftly glide through your email again.
(It will auto-update in the next few hours in Chrome; in the next few days in Firefox – but you can grab it immediately from www.activeinboxhq.com/install.php).

From first thing next week, I will:
* Work with Pete to start fitting into Gmail’s new theme
* Get ActiveInbox working more neatly with Gmail’s new types of Inbox (e.g. “Important”, “Priority”, etc.).
* Continue to address any other smaller issues getting reported on the forum
* Get started with the big new developments

See you next week!
Andy

Update 17/07/2011:
http://www.activeinboxhq.com/blog/2011/07/17/did-your-hab-sneak-off-update-ready-for-you/

If you’re super short of time, then very briefly: I apologise for being hard to reach for the last few weeks, I’ve expanded the team and added some much needed pennies to our bank account and our runway is all clear for a round of innovations in Gmail!

Delving Into The Last Month

As I mentioned in the last blog post (and I was loving the comments – thank you!), a month ago I relocated to Brighton (on the British south coast) to give ActiveInbox a much healthier environment to grow up in.

Ever since GTDGmail was released as a hobby project in 2006, it’s been largely tied to me. Pete came in during 2009 to make it actually fun to use and delightful to look at, and we’ve been helped by various people over the years, but I kept pushing back the opportunity to scale properly…

So, during the last month I’ve been busy recruiting three new names to help us grow:

Andrea is here to focus on stability. We’re rebuilding a chunk of the code so that rather than taking around 48 hours to fix a Gmail change, we can detect a problem and update it within half a day; and the best bit is that in some cases, you won’t even need to manually upgrade ActiveInbox – the fix will just happen! (Oh, and Andrea will also work on a Translation system, so we can localise ActiveInbox into other languages).

Sal is going to essentially set up a giant listening dish, to combine the feedback on Get Satisfaction with his own research (you may hear from him soon!) and then translate what he hears into ideas we can all discuss together before putting them into development. Essentially, Sal, is streamlining our process to evolve ActiveInbox in the best way possible.
Meanwhile, Lisa is stepping aboard to join me with customer support conversations and keep the momentum of those conversations high (I suffer with this as I’m pretty poor at switching between high level talking mode and low level coding mode!).

As for me, in a mad blitz of feature development, I’m going to sprint for a month in July to roll out (amongst other smaller tweaks):

• Multiple Inboxes to keep important emails on your radar
• Add ‘Escalate to GCal’ feature to get emails more easily into the calendar
• A very cool addition to ‘Waiting On’ (ha, I hate teases… but it deserves a post of its own!)

And Pete will be donning a pair of overalls and picking up his paint brush to make ActiveInbox look strokably lovely in the new Gmail theme.

Finally, and for me right now most importantly, I absolutely must offer an apology to everyone who’s emailed in the last few weeks. On top of the big move and the efforts to recruit, I did some consulting to inject some cash (that has made all the difference to us to safely fund that recruitment), but the intensity of it completely blocked out the chance to do anything but keep ActiveInbox on life support. Sorry. In a big big way. Lisa & I will work through the backlog over the coming weeks.

Next step: a quick fix update to ActiveInbox so that “Archive & MoveNext” works again, by Monday.