HAB Where You Want It, Cleaner Deadline Labels and a little Prettification [4.0.4.1]

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

This entry was posted on Friday, January 6th, 2012 at 6:55 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

  • Ronald Steed

    Great job team!  On a technical note, I have stars enables as a status label, but noticed that starred emails do not show up on the Active Results “to do” list when I do searches by project. Is that intensional?  Using Mac OS X 10.7.2, Chrome 16.0.912.75, AIB 4-0-4-0

  • http://twitter.com/rfrazee Ryan Frazee

    Great job.  FYI, before I installed the update, I had 0 overdue items.  Now I have 47 items.  Looks like there is probably an error in the conversion from old tags to new tags.  Not the end of the world, I can review them quickly, but I would recommend you check it out.

  • Stelvio Gori

    Can’t find the “Migrate date label button” and now Overdue count = 0, it would be a huge time loss to check each one of the 160 active items in my Inbox… Please check and fix, anyway thanks for looking to improve the product.
    Kind Regards

  • http://twitter.com/rfrazee Ryan Frazee
  • http://profiles.google.com/philip.bowman Philip Bowman

    Excellent, thanks very much for fixing the HAB in place. Sorry about the tomato stains :)

    Date labels seem to have migrated OK – will have to have a play with setting a label on my phone next.

  • Justin Lewis-Anthony

    REALLY like the HAB staying fixed in place. Unhappily the black google bar disappears *under* the bookmarks bar (in Chrome) when I scroll down the screen.

    Also… “Upcoming” !!!! (can’t we have a English-English version where it says, properly, “Forthcoming”

  • Justin Lewis-Anthony

    Hah! Disqus automatically fixed my html with “harumph-mode”! (new for HTML5!)

  • John Nelson

    Using 4.0.4.1, which is a huge improvement over previous version because of the fixed HAB, I  notice that in using “Group By” deadline in the active inbox of the “Scheduled” ToDo’s shows the deadline dates on the left side, bolded properly, but on the right side below the “Group by” dropdown, I have the arrival time or date of the conversation, which visually would seem to be the group date. Perhaps the “Group by” dropdown could be positioned on the left side for more visual consistency. The same effect is present for other group criteria, but in those the date is not relevant, but in all cases the dropdown would look better closer to the left side of the view I think.

  • Alex

    Just an idea about the deadline feature: it’d be so great if a “Today” pane can be displayed on the Inbox page using the Multiple Inboxes feature of Gmail. That will make what’s due today obvious and saving one click to click the “Today” button on the HAB. Likewise, another pane for “Upcoming” is good too so that the user know what lies ahead in the next few days.

    This is not possible now since the “Today” button is a dynamic Gmail search and Multiple Inboxes only accept static query.

  • http://www.facebook.com/ProjectBlake Blake Eitniear

    this breaks the google lab “chat on the right”. not a big deal, I just turned it off, but I thought i’d throw that out there. ultimately all of these changes don’t take into account those of us with big monitors. plus now my labels are buried at the bottom (I already was using “Z”.)… details.

  • Andrew Gross

    Could consider using the thick google client for chat… or my current favorite — Digsby.

  • Just Me

    Ahh – once again: Thank you so much! I have just been on vacation up north in Finland without Internet connection. And next week work starts again – so I was more than happy to log into my account to find this update. Great work! Especially the “only one date tag” is a real pleasure and (finally) opens the gateway for heavy & effective mobile usage … ;-)

    This is my second year using AIB Plus – and I can’t live without it anymore!

  • Gary Beckmann

    Why can’t we have the label drop-down back? It’s been gone for so long now. The Project drop-down isn’t really useful for this user. Whereas labels organized hierarchically would be extremely useful.

  • Steve Gledhill

    Great Improvement. Love the HAB being fixed in place. I got the deadline refresh by opening an email: a pop up appeared with a button to press. All deadlines translated correctly.
    Well done.

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_RKMHJONNMCBYTLSOOYBNEKK4AE NSFW

    I love all the new features. However, even with the 4.0.4.1 fix, I’m not super happy about the way the Active Results tab is displaying *all* of the action categories. I liked it when I clicked on “Today” and it just shows me today, “Action” only showed action, etc…

  • Hector_C

    The “Update Deadline Labels” is a great feature, however, there is NO option for the month which it should consider to be the cut-off for last year vs this year.
    For example, I’m doing the Update in Feb-2012 (month 02), the Update Deadline label feature ASSUMES that all of the labels from 3 months back (11, 10, 09, etc) are for this year (when they are actually not, they’re for 2011!  I’m just VERY behind in updating my Deadlines and/or Action items…  could I really be the only one that’s behind in their updates !?????
    ** Hope this helps improve the import/update deadline labels feature, because now I have to go and modify about 70 deadlines from projects I’m a little behind on.  Should I just be thanking you guys because those “Todo’s” will get updated !?  Oh, but I really didn’t have the time today — gotta be done, I guess !  LOVE your application guys… keep up the good work !

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