In England’s Middle Ages, men convicted of high treason were “drawn by horse to the place of execution, where they were hanged (almost to the point of death), emasculated, disembowelled, beheaded and quartered (chopped into four pieces)”. (The article, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanged,_drawn_and_quartered, is fascinating in its detail!).

I mention this only to give myself a healthy perspective on this very unusual week…

I’m currently under high pressure to take care of several unrelated things, from fixing our error reporting system (the server had problems); to putting systems in place to gather information from surveys, polls and other feedback so we can prioritise what everyone in the community is asking for; to fixing the critical bugs a few of you have been kind enough to report; to finally being able to get back to doing what I love doing most: delivering actual ActiveInbox improvements

The impact of this is that there will probably not be another interesting release until next week, although there may be a minor bug fixing release in a couple of days, and I won’t be appearing much on the support forum. But fear not! Lisa is expertly and warmly answering all of you, and letting me know if anything needs urgently taking care of!

“Send & Archive” is back!

It’s got a slightly simplified design (because the HAB will be going into the fixed-part of Gmail, and so always visible, so we no longer need to embed it in the Reply box); but it’s ready to keep your inbox at zero.

Pinning fixed (no really, I mean it!)

There was still a small group of people who couldn’t pin properly, I’m really sorry about that. It turned into a really finicky problem, but I’ve dealt with it now.

Create Label from Review Bar dropdown

As per request! You can now create labels from the Projects dropdown in the Review Bar.

Previous Emails load on click

I fixed a simple little bug that stopped you opening an email in the Previous Emails list (found when you click Reply in a conversation); so you can quickly catch up on recent discussions to help you write your email.

Notes Dropdown will not lose your notes

Notes had the potential to be really irritating, by closing when you clicked the “Always Show Notes” checkbox, causing you to lose your unsaved note. I’ve fixed this now.

Auto update will kick in soon enough, but you can also grab it from http://www.activeinboxhq.com/install.php.

Update that changed 4.0.3.5 to 4.0.3.6

Okay, it’s 3:22am (I thought I’d mention it because I’m exhausted and it’s an opportunity to play my violin!), but thanks to Michael and David I realised shortly after 4.0.3.5 got released that there were visual glitches in the To Do dropdown, and possibly still (STILL!) issues with pinning being remembered. I’ve just pushed 4.0.3.6 to get them fixed, about an hour after 4.0.3.5 originally went live (and late in both Europe and the US), so I hope only a handful of people were affected with the bad release.

This is a quick collection of bug fixes that you reported over the weekend. Thank you to everyone who wrote in.

The ToDo Pinning Problem

The Review Bar now pins ToDo items and always remembers them (and you can edit them by clicking the ‘To Do’ dropdown, then clicking the green pin icon).

The Plus icon no longer obscures the star on Firefox

Some people thought we were trying to restrict the starring facility on Gmail for ActiveInbox Plus… It was absolutely an honest mistake! Something in the Firefox renderer caused the “Reply to Self” Plus icon to appear over the Gmail star in conversations. Now fixed.

Notes dropdown is always visible

The Notes dropdown will no longer appear off the screen.

Statuses and Deadlines Update Instantly

A Gmail change meant that applying Status and Deadline items was taking longer than usual: now fixed (and rolled out even to older versions of ActiveInbox).

Previous Emails can be read in conversations

I fixed a bug that stopped the previous conversation from popping-up when clicked in ‘Previous Emails’ in the reply box.

Firefox 10 Compatible

As Firefox continues to update at a terrifying pace, we now support up to version 10.

It will auto-update, but you can download from http://www.activeinboxhq.com/install.php

There was an embarrassing bug in the last release, where some new users were not seeing the Setup screen (and then rightfully wondering where the Status buttons were); and some other users were ALWAYS seeing the Setup screen. This new version is much more thoughtful in how evenly it hands it out

(A big thanks to Dan for helping me diagnose this!)

A few more minor tweaks besides: pinned items are sorted alphabetically, your version of ActiveInbox is always shown in the Support dropdown, and the preferences screen has been cleaned up.

It will auto update, but as ever, if you wish jump the gun you can upgrade from http://www.activeinboxhq.com/install.php

Update Friday 11th November, 12:36 EST

It seems there’s a minor glitch in this version that wipes out the To Do pinned items. It’s super easy to restore them, and worthwhile knowing:

Thank you to everyone who helped over the last week. Your input has made the difference between something functional and something awesome (and I still have a lot more of it to process!).

If you’ve been waiting to upgrade to New Look Gmail (or you have and have been wondering where your ActiveInbox Sidebar went), this is an equally big update of ActiveInbox that’s all ready to go to work!

You can grab it right now from the Install Page, or it will auto update in your browser soon.

To catch up on the discussion so far:

• Introducing the Top Review Bar
• Introducing the New Action Bar in Conversations

Support Emails

Lisa is going to be getting in touch with all of you in email and on the forum by morning – expect to hear from her very soon.

Up next…

I won’t be slowing down… there is work to be done on conserving vertical space, making the Action Bar work in the Inbox and Search Results and lots of smaller tweaks based on your feedback. I’m aiming for a significant release every week or so.

We’re still doing crazily intense release cycles, but as they say, “if you want something done, ask a busy person”… I’m thrilled with what we’re producing at the moment: even if I were the last person using ActiveInbox I’d still be delighted to be doing this (but thankfully I’m only one of a great many of us!).

There are still a few rough edges, but nothing unpleasant and I’d rather get something into your hands asap. So…

The New Action Bar: Shiny Like An Arrow

Pete has done a stunning job on this redesign, incorporating a lot of influence from Gmail’s new environment and combining it with all your feedback.

Of notable utility, the Move-Nexter buttons are fixed in place. That means when you clear out your inbox, you can always expect your mouse to be over the buttons ready to process the next conversation.

Oh, and it only takes one line! The Notes row is now optional, and because the buttons are smaller, it’s less likely to wrap onto a second line.

And have you noticed, ActiveInbox is now very close to being just a slimline Review Bar and Action Bar? I LOVE how lightweight it’s becoming!

Review Bar Pins Your Most Important Labels

There was much discussion on this last week, and I don’t think we’ve heard the last yet: but for now, you can pin any label in ActiveInbox, and it’ll appear at the top of its dropdown for easy access.

The ‘Support’ Tab Keeps You Up To Date

The Support dropdown now monitors our servers ever few hours for news and updates, and – without interrupting you – lets you know what’s happening.

A Few Gmail Changes Have Been Swept Away

The Action Bar now appears in the Compose view again; and Status buttons will not go missing again.

Known Issues

Ah yes, we’re not completely through the woods yet.

• Send & Archive has been temporarily closed for refurbishment
• Previous Emails continues to be a bit out of place
• No relief for vertical space usage just yet
• The Active Results still need to increase their usability

If you want to just upgrade, go to http://www.activeinboxhq.com/install_nlg.php. Two things to be aware of:
1) We’re not pushing this by auto-update just yet (we will do in a few hours).
2) You will need to close your Gmail tab and open a new tab after upgrading; and if there are still visual glitches, clear out your browser cache and restart it.

Just a quick one!

This update addresses a few of the issues you reported in the blog comments yesterday:

• The todo counts update when you action/deadline something
• The Support/Preferences links are hidden until I’ve had time to implement them
• The chat icon doesn’t get pushed off the bottom of Gmail anymore

You can grab it from http://www.activeinboxhq.com/install_nlg.php.

Pinning Labels and the Sidebar?

One of the trickier questions that came up on yesterday’s post: what shall we do with pinned labels on the top bar?

Clearly using more vertical space is not an option; and would lose the very clean look.

1) Put the pinned labels at the top of the Projects dropdown (well, at the top of each label type’s dropdown).

2) Take greater control of Gmail’s existing facility for labels in the sidebar: Recent Labels. Rather than duplicate that functionality, we could have it so that when you pin a label, it’s definitely added to Recent Labels; and when you unpin a label, it’s removed. Furthermore, we could remove the prefix (e.g. P/) and possibly add a folder icon to indicate they’re AIB folders, and finally order them alphabetically.

Which would work for you?

Update Sunday 6 Nov at 12:06

Okay, from the blog comments I’m thinking I didn’t do a great job of explaining the proposals… let me try in more detail!

AIB Moved Out Of The Sidebar Because It Wasn’t Reminding Us…

So why did I pull AIB out of the sidebar? There’s two major reasons. First, it was simply not very easy to use: menus were prone to flying out without good reason, the sidebar is already really cluttered, and worst of all, it was very easy to ignore, so todos got missed. Second, the new Gmail made “being easy to ignore” 10x worse because of its dynamic scaling when you mouse over it. Essentially, new look Gmail pushed us out.

In short, it’s not a trivial for us to “turn the sidebar back on”. (And I don’t believe we want to…)

Auto-Hide Keeps Vertical Space To A Minimum

Now, I work with a small screen myself. So your main concern about using precious vertical space… I feel it too.

However, one idea I have at the moment is to – as a preference – dynamically hide certain features in the fixed-header-pane (the bit that includes the Google bar – the one that links to ‘Mail, Calendar, Docs, Google+, etc.’, our Reminder bar, Gmail’s search, etc.). Especially Gmail’s Google bar. It could be minimised until you mouse over it; it could re-appear when you’re in the inbox but hide itself at other times.

We Pin To Focus On Today’s Important Things

And to the question of pinning. Why do we pin? To get quick access to the thing we’re currently working on faster than anything else. The most common thing we’re likely to want to see.

There is also a difference between things we always want visible – the todo count of ‘Today’ for example, and the things we just want quick access to, such as a project you’re working on, which can be slightly less visible.

I think that having ‘pinned’ items appear at the top of the Review Bar dropdowns would give us this very elegantly.

We could also experiment with other forms of reminder, such as a timely “You have 6 actions over 1 day old”, “You have not looked at your Home context recently”, etc.

And if you’re a power user who doesn’t worry about vertical-space, we could also add a row for pinning items below the main bar.

We Can Pin Less If We Clean Up Old Projects

If we make it very easy to take a project label (or whatever), and say “this is old, take it out of my sight”, then we need to pin things less, because the regular list will be much more focused.

Having AIB Reviews in two places is fragmenting

A major reason I’m cautious about having ActiveInbox appear both in the top bar and the sidebar is that you lose track of where to look for things. Instead of just going for the top bar, you have to decide first if the thing you want is at the top or on the left.

This is why I think we need to spend some time with only the top bar, so we can get used to looking there; rather than the sidebar. If after a few weeks it’s really not working, we can reconsider.

One thing we could try would be to just put pinned items in the Gmail sidebar.

A wireframe of things we can do:

Hi all,

Is it still Thursday in America? I fear I may have overshot by about 11 minutes!

Today was another manic day, and we’re nowhere near finished… so consider this an “incomplete sneak preview” of what is developing, that will also enable you to use ActiveInbox on new look Gmail

It’s aimed at people who are comfortable with beta software and can handle visual glitches and maybe a bug or two. If that’s you, you can download it from http://activeinboxhq.com/install_nlg.php. (See? I’ve even used a geeky link… that’s how techy this release is!).

I’m hoping to get the proper release ready for Tuesday 8th November, which will complete the visual changes and start us rolling, with regular beta previews for our community, towards ActiveInbox 5…

Hey all,

The battle with Gmail’s New Look is entering its second day…

The last 17 hours have been a cliched coffee consuming flurry of activity that has given us the new Top Bar – finally letting it escape weeks of planning – and a HAB that once again works in conversations. As a by-product of all this I’ve managed to speed up some performance issues for those of you with many active emails, and even to reduce the overall size of ActiveInbox.

However, this is a huge job – bigger than I rather optimistically anticipated! – and so tomorrow I’ll be restoring the Active Results, “Send & Archive” and tackling the remaining loose ends…

And then there may just be a new release for everyone on the blog to try

Just a quick status update… ActiveInbox is partly broken in Gmail’s new look (which is very cool by the way!).

I’ve just got my hands on it, but it’s nearly 10pm here in the UK. I’m aiming to have something ready tomorrow to work with it.

In the meantime, you can tell Gmail to “Temporarily Revert To the Old Look”, by clicking the cog icon near the top right of the messages… and after doing this, you can switch forward again to the New Look. You might want to revert just to keep AIB working.

Just to brace you all, one of the big changes we’ve been planning is in production and will be released as part of this: the sidebar will become a “top bar” (just below the black Google bar). As well as being a lot cleaner (reducing ActiveInbox almost to just a Review Bar and a Horizontal Action Bar); it gives us more ways to deliver timely reminders for staying on top of email!