Okay, this took a lot longer than usual to update – an 9 hour slog in total, but it’s ready now!

It fixes the missing HAB in conversations, which started happening overnight on some accounts.

You can grab 4.0.2.24 from the Install Page.

And, much MUCH more excitingly, it’s the first ever version capable of truly fast updates in the future. So, if we have another Gmail change, fingers crossed, you might not have to lift a finger to update ActiveInbox!

Update 1/09/2011
I’ve just released 4.0.2.25 to counter the unclickable sidebar issue: http://www.activeinboxhq.com/blog/2011/09/01/fixing-the-unclickable-sidebar-issue-activeinbox-4-0-2-25/

Just fixing up a Gmail change that disabled the HAB in conversations – it’s got a few nasty sharp edges though, so might take another 2hrs! Blog/Twitter post to follow.

Update 31/08/2011
This is now fixed, please see http://www.activeinboxhq.com/blog/2011/08/31/important-update-fix-missing-hab/

This is a follow on to last week’s “Thoughts On Gmail’s Preview Pane“, with a concrete proposal for the next big ActiveInbox update.

Let us first disclaim ourselves: normally for Labs, especially ones as extensively breaking as Preview Pane, we can’t support them. BUT it seems Preview Pane has struck a chord. So, to balance those two things, I want to make some changes that are generally beneficial to all AIB users, but also make things work better for Preview Pane users.

Jettisoning The Dead Weight

The inbox/search-results row cube will not survive. I find it increasingly to be ugly, dysfunctional and meaningless (actually, it’s main crime is being a meaningless symbol, those other attributes are just a by-product of that). I will keep the ability to right click a thread and see a preview popup; although it’s low priority and it may be a while before it works fully with the many new inboxes that Gmail is showcasing (“Classic”, “Important First”, etc.).

Seizing Control

Most importantly, we want super fluid control of Statuses, Deadlines, Projects etc. in the inbox/search-results view.

One popular idea is to add the HAB to the header, but that adds an awful lot of vertical space and unnecessary duplication for people who don’t want the full HAB in this view. If it gets included at all, it should be toggle-able. (The two advantages I can think of for having it: at-a-glance visualisation of a conversation’s status, and the calendar for deadline selection).

A more elegant step is to extend the power of the standard Gmail ‘Labels‘ dropdown. The tricky bit is deadlines. But given the discussions we had in the last blog post about Deadlines, I think we will restructure the deadlines labels into the single-label format of D/yyyymmdd (e.g. D/20110823 for the day I posted this). With this, the Labels dropdown could be used to just type out the date.

We could also augment it to recognise special keyword terms like ‘today’ and ‘tomorrow’; maybe even adding these visually to the bottom of the menu.

Lingering Shadows Of The New Preview Pane

The one thing that’s going to be really difficult in the new Preview Pane is the ‘Conversation Notes’ and the ‘Previous Emails’ feature, because I can’t easily detect which conversation is actually being viewed.

So, for the time being, Conversation Notes and Previous Emails are going to be dropped for users of the Preview Pane lab. Hopefully we can bring them back later.

Liberated! By The Keyboard Resistance

The main reason I’ve not yet got around to keyboard shortcuts is indecision about which keys to use; and who will remember them. In fact, I must confess I’m hopeless at remembering the shortcut keys in Gmail.

Due to this combination – of not having many keys to choose from and the difficulty in recalling the keys we introduce – I’m proposing instead we get Alfred inspired.

The keyboard director will popup when you press a configurable combination (e.g. ctrl+m), and then you can begin typing to auto-complete where you want to go. E.g. if you enter a label, and you’re in a conversation that doesn’t have it, the first choice will be to add it; the second choice to search for it; the third choice to preview it in a floating popup and so on.

The most useful bit of this is that it’ll have two keys to complete: Enter will simply do it; Tab will do it and then reset the keyboard director so you can type the next command… effectively enabling you chain commands together.

What do you think?

Have I made any glaringly bad assumptions? What will add the most value for you?

It’s very clear from a lot of your feedback – and I readily agree – that we could improve the ‘Archive/Delete/etc. >’ buttons on the Horizontal Action Bar (aka HAB).

However, exactly what is wrong is hard to define. There are many different kinds of minor complaints thrown at it, which include:

• It duplicates Gmail’s own crisply-clickable Archive button: a confusing waste of precious screen real estate.
• The interaction of ‘dropdown on mouseover’ is fiddly, and it works better permanently in the right-hand sidebar (where the ads and People Viewer is).
• The ‘Archive >’ button would work better being first on the HAB for easier access, before the Status buttons
• There should be an option to change the default from ‘Archive’ (e.g. ‘Delete’).
• The ‘<' and '>‘ arrows are confusing, and the user does not know what will happen.

The underlying message is that a fair % of ActiveInbox users do not use the button, and therefore it takes up too much room.

Taking a step back, what was the original intent?

1. It is part of the Inbox Zero flow: you work the HAB from left to right, adding a Status or Deadline, assigning to a Project or Context, and then clearing it out the inbox and moving to the next message. However:
   • We don’t always need to defer it with a Status/Deadline, very often we just want to discard it, so the archive/delete should be the first thing on the HAB.
   • When we’re working through non-inbox items (e.g. our Action list), there is no use for ‘Archive’. Just ‘Finish’ and ‘Next’ really matter.
2. It reduces procrastination, as the presence of the Move-Nexter arrow gives you the per-message choice to go back to the inbox, or keep progressing through the messages without interruption.

Some ideas for improvements to get us started:

• Go for complete Keyboard Control, where you can apply a Status/Deadline/Project (using Enter to do just one action, and Tab to do the action and then do another one), then use the keyboard shortcut to ‘Archive and Move Next’. Drop the ‘Archive >’ dropdown from the HAB.
• When you mouse over the regular Gmail Archive/Delete/Spam buttons, a hover appears with a button that lets you select to < or > and move on after selection. Drop the ‘Archive >’ dropdown from the HAB.
• Introduce a new row that has a countdown timer and 3 options: Do It, Defer, Delete (and move next). Drop the ‘Archive >’ from the HAB. This might even be a new addon.
• Reduce the size of the ‘Move-Nexter’, so it’s just an icon. When you mouse over it, it opens up all options (Archive/Delete/etc.).
  • Make it possible to hold Shift when you click a Status, Deadline or Project, that automatically moves you to the next item. (Or even make this a full time option).
  • Move the ‘Archive >’ to the right-hand sidebar (at the risk it might clash with People Viewer, Rapportive, etc.)
• Just keep as is, but increase the clarity/clickability of the buttons with a design refresh.

What would you have done to the Move Nexter?

All thoughts and suggestions welcome – even if they’re off-list. I’d love to know how you use the Move Nexters, how you process your inbox (a story of your day is always useful), and what you’d do if the Move Nexters were removed?

I’ve just released 4.0.2.22 in response to people finding their Horizontal Action Bar disappearing.

This feels a little like a wolf running into the field just before I managed to herd the last sheep into the pen…

You see, we’re about 6 hours away from finishing the auto-updater to handle Gmail changes (which when ready, will mean you never have to manually update ActiveInbox again for small glitches like this), but I had to halt production and get this fix out before the majority of the US wakes up!

The next update will be tomorrow. For now, you can grab 4.0.2.22 from the Install page.

Back when we were thinking of ways of doing deadlines with ActiveInbox, we were heavily influenced by the concept of 43 Folders (not least because Merlin Mann, of 43folders.com fame, was one of the first people to feature our hobby project, worth mentioning as we are pretty much at our 5th anniversary!).

It has two great advantages: there are never more than 43 labels (12 months + 31 days, combinable to represent any day in the year) and those labels are against each message – so the deadline information is available wherever you can access Gmail (it’s not stored in a separate system).

But it has one major weakness: when accessing Gmail through a desktop mail client, or your smartphone, or an ipad, you can’t do a search for a message in two folders (e.g. D/D/1, D/M/1 for 1st Jan). This is a serious failing for retrieving information. I’ve heard anecdotally that it stops quite a few people using deadlines in AIB.

(A note on email reminders: Just so we don’t get distracted, I should say that whether we alter our deadline label approach or not, one thing is for definite: we’ll do email reminders. This is a given! So, when you set a deadline, there will be a checkbox to “Return to inbox on day”.)

There are two alternatives we can consider to labeling:

1. You could give ActiveInbox direct access to your Gmail account. Then, in the background ActiveInbox could turn two labels like D/M/8 D/D/10 (today) into D/Today, so you can do simple queries on any device. You could also add the D/Today label on your mobile device, and have it auto-change into the full length labels. The downside here, other than a lot more costs for us, is you’d have to be comfortable with granting ActiveInbox permission to your Gmail. I’m not sure how many new users would like this.
2. We could change the label structure. Rather than D/M/8 D/D/10 we could have D/20110810. Just one label means that you can always access the day from your mobile device, without any major changes to the way ActiveInbox works. We could also auto-prune labels no longer in use. So, if a few days later there are no messages with the D/20110810 label, it could be removed from Gmail account (to reduce clutter).

And the obligatory “how do you use” deadlining question:

I have to ask! How would you tell a co-worker or friend about the benefit of deadlining your email with ActiveInbox?

(This is both really interesting to know and might also reveal a better approach to deadlining!).

Thanks to Hasit and Alexandre for letting me know about a new Gmail Lab feature, “Preview Pane”.

This is a pretty cool addition for maintaining an overall context of your progress through conversations, at the cost of more clutter / less focus on the current conversation.

I suspect it’s going to be popular with a sizeable % of us, particularly as its reminiscent of what we expect to find in “normal” email clients.

What has me stumped is I’m not sure how quickly we can adapt AIB around it. It’s not as simple as a technical fix, as just planting the HAB (Horizontal Action Box) in the new preview pane is going to add to clutter. Also, I’m not sure how much it changes the workflow to use the new preview pane.

We’re going to have to marinate/discuss it (in the comments) for a few days.

Is It Time To Retire Our Preview Popup To Focus On New Features?

One immediate consideration is that we might drop our own Preview Popup – or at least the cube in rows. Gmail now has two Lab features that make it unnecessary: their own right click Preview, and now the Preview Pane.

Rather than a costly message preview, we could add features to just quickly add Status/Deadlines to a message & archive from the thread list.

Excited! That’s the word for our progress with the Big Stability System… at a high level we’ve cracked a way to fix the most common problems without having to fully install a new version of ActiveInbox, which I hope will be ready to test in the next few days.

But in the mean time, there was an urgent need to sneak out an immediate update to some problems that you’ve been reporting. To introduce each of these foes, I’ll give them tedious sounding names:

The ‘Big Conversation’ Bear Trap

There have been a few threads on Get Satisfaction about how a conversation over 10 messages long can cause full CPU usage in Chrome for up to a minute; and in about 3 cases even led to being momentarily locked out of Gmail. This was obviously a super critical problem to research (we have successfully avoided any lock outs – a safety measure against intensive Gmail activity – for the last 3 years), even though I wasn’t at all certain what role AIB might be playing in it.

Well, it turns out there was a problem that affected conversations with many messages (especially if they contain images) and an existing status/deadline… they load so slowly that AIB thinks you’re receiving new messages and goes into over drive doing a little house keeping to stay on top of things.

Of course, it’s very wasteful to do that, so I’ve devised a test to make sure it can tell the difference between a slow (large) conversation load and an incoming reply; and it now only does the bare minimum it has to do: it’s a lot more efficient! I’m hoping all speed problems on loading a conversation are now gone.

The Morphing Shadowy Nature Of ‘Recent Labels’

Okay, that grandiose title somewhat overstates the reality! A little Gmail change meant that ActiveInbox couldn’t find the location of your labels in the sidebar, and threw its “Recent Label” toy out of the pram. This is now dealt with. (And this is exactly the kind of problem the new Big Stability System will instantly fix).

Notes Avoiding Their Duty

It was reported that Notes were not appearing when using the Preview Popup in the inbox or search results… and lo, it’s true! This was a quick & easy fix

You can grab 4.0.2.20 from http://www.activeinboxhq.com/install.php right now!