It seems that 4.0.4.5 wasn’t the utopian release I hoped it was. Thanks to Trent, Jason, Mark, Cliff, Ian, Brad, Michael and everyone else who patiently emailed in details, I think we’ve got a lot more stability (touch wood!).

* Including Overdue in Today is now a preference
* Some people were not seeing the HAB work correctly in conversations, which should now be fixed
* The ‘kilometre wide Gmail conversations’ bug has been fixed
* You can now pin sub-folder labels to the Review Bar (and search Active Results properly)
* People with dark themes can now see Notes and warning messages more easily
* ‘old’ no longer appears in Group By and Sort By

What’s that Skippy? You want to easily export emails to GCal?

This has been a much-request feature on Get Satisfaction for aaages, and we’ve now got it!

You’ll see a new icon on the Horizontal Action Bar for exporting an email to GCal. It’ll create a new event, and then back in Gmail, try to detect a link to that event and add it to your Notes. So, the email links to the GCal event, and the GCal event links back to the email.

Mark (who lead development on it) & I would love to hear about the usability of it in the comments please

Installing 4.0.4.6

Just pop over to http://activeinboxhq.com/install_preview.php and install as normal!

This is just a little bug fixing release based on everyone’s feedback, thank you so much for all your help!

Fixed A Major Issue With Migrating Deadline Labels

So, some of you could not migrate your labels (the migrate button did nothing), and some of you found ActiveInbox was giving you 0 active results after migration.

It transpires the problem was the same in both cases, and something I’d completely failed to foresee (which is why we do preview releases!).

I won’t bore you with the geeky details, but essentially it was caused by “too many” deadline labels.

The good news is I’ve fixed and so thankfully, there’s no longer an issue with “too many” deadline labels! Everything should be fine now.

Remember Group By and Sort By For Each Type Of Result

Your choice of Group By and Sort By is now saved for Statuses, Deadlines, Projects and your other label types.

So for example, you can organise Statuses by Project, and organise Projects by Deadlines.

Overdue Items Are Included in Today

This might be controversial? Let me know in the comments if you disagree!

Installing It

You can get 4.0.4.5 from http://www.activeinboxhq.com/install_preview.php

I had a New Year’s Resolution that I would stop working crazy late nights… which has lasted less than time than it took to celebrate Christmas itself (and is about on par with all other New Year’s Resolutions!).

Please forgive any terseness in this post, I’m seeing in the early hours of a new day and I’m experiencing that distinctive creative block you get when your brain starts behaving like a petulant toddler who’ll do nothing until you put him to bed. I will try and add screenshots tomorrow.

But I REALLY wanted to get this live and share the tasty morsels of goodness within:

Active Results Simplified (and given sorting)

The Active Results have been cleaned up (including removing that irritating line that stopped you clicking Compose), so that it’s a lot easier to focus on the actual email results. The old, restrictive hierarchy of results has gone away, to be replaced by an intuitive and flexible combination of “Group By” and “Sort By”.

Review Bar opens straight into Active Results

This feels like a really clean interaction and brings an end to a lot of confused emails I receive (I hope!). Now when you click any link on the Review Bar, the Active Results view is the one and only choice. (Note you can change this Preference back to Gmail Results).

Pin Projects to the actual Review Bar

Another much requested one, there is now a checkbox in the Projects (and other label types) dropdown to “Put pinned items on the Review Bar”. This means they really are ever-present and ready to be viewed.

Bug Fixes

4.0.4.x so far has been a preview release – as is this one – and you have been kind enough to report some issues.

The most hair raising one was the people for whom Today/Overdue links disappeared (and had other weird behaviour connected to that), which I *hope* is fixed, but I don’t experience it so I’m working blind. Thanks especially to Blake & Jason for giving me details. Let me know if it still gives you trouble!

Installing 4.0.4.3

As it is still a preview release, I haven’t made it auto-update. You can install it from http://activeinboxhq.com/install_preview.php

Please let me know what you think of the updates in the comments…

I’ve just released 4.0.4.1, available on the original post: http://www.activeinboxhq.com/blog/2012/01/06/hab-where-you-want-it-cleaner-deadline-labels-and-a-little-prettification-4-0-4-0/.

Thank you to everyone that reported problems this afternoon!

It includes the more irritating bugs:
* The Overdue link now sticks to dates, you know, that are actually overdue
* The Active Results can group by Deadline

Do you use deadlines every day or so?

Have you been hoping for more reminders to make sure you hit them?

I’ve been working with Mark to get something cooking and it’s nearly warmed through… now we need some toughs to brawl their way through the probable difficulties such a major new feature will have! 10 deadline power users, to be precise.

If you want to be involved, drop me an email to andym at activeinboxhq.com and I’ll hook you up to the mystery feature. All you need to then do is let Mark & I know if you face any issues.

As with all good competitions, we need Ts & Cs! So, only the first 10 applicants will be accepted, we can’t respond to everyone that asks, editor’s decision is final, and a limerick won’t help your cause (this may not be strictly true).

Happy New Year, followers of the Gregorian calendar, and a friendly wave to everyone else!

We fell into a rather long development cycle in December as we had to undergo a few complex bits & bobs. For this reason, I’m not going to push this release live to everyone, but instead offer it cautiously to power users on the blog. Softly softly…

HAB Where You Want It

The Horizontal Action Bar is now a permanent fixture on Gmail’s header, after much heckling from the stalls, and possibly a few hurled tomatoes.

It means that wherever you scroll on the conversation, the status buttons, deadlines, projects and move-nexters are instantly accessible.

Cleaner Deadline Labels

We had a big discussion about this a few months ago, and it’s finally gone into production.

Essentially, we’ve dropped the 43 folders paradigm (of 12 month labels and 31 day labels, e.g. D/D/6 D/M/1 for today) in favour of a single label in the format ZD/yyyymmdd (e.g. ZD/20120106).

The main reason for this is mobile use. Regular mail clients cannot handle multiple label searches (i.e. the day and the month), so there was no way to review a deadline on the go. Now you can just scan through all known deadline folders.

It’s also visually cleaner, and less likely to go wrong (before it might break if you had the day label but not the month label).

And of course, it can finally consider years.

If you’re wondering, it will clean up after itself: if there are no longer any conversations that have a given deadline label (because they’ve all been completed), ActiveInbox will remove that deadline label from Gmail.

When you load the new version of ActiveInbox, there is a big button on the HAB to migrate your deadlines. Let it run, refresh Gmail, and everything will be ready to go!

And more…

Pete prettified a few bits & pieces: the dropdown calendar is a lot more useable and we’ve finally got “real” pin icons (a constant source of confusion!).

The Notes viewer has a new option “Show Notes on Action Bar Only If Note Written”, so you cannot forget a note you’ve written.

You can install it for:
* Chrome, by clicking http://www.activeinboxhq.com/activeinbox_4-0-4-1.crx
* Firefox, by clicking http://www.activeinboxhq.com/activeinbox_4-0-4-1.xpi