ActiveInbox: Make your Inbox your Donebox

Try the new Active Results [4.0.4.3]

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…

Jason

Thank you, Andy…for all your hard work! Your efforts are much appreciated! I love AIB!
Just Me

Great, once again: Thank you – another very nice improvement! Needless to say that I can’t live without AIB anymore …
Stelvio Gori

Guys, great job!
Just a little improvement: row height in Active results does not match the “general” Gmail choice (I keep very compact), but apart from this it’s a great enhancement.
Teleo

There is a major usability problem in the update: the “Group By” field in Active Results is the same when you filter by project, and when you show Actions or Waiting.If you are seeing actions, you might want to group them by project. But then if you go to a project, the display will keep grouping by project, which doesn’t make sense, because you only see a single project anyway.

Similarly, if when seeing a list of items of a particular project you group by status, then when you switch to Actions the list will still group by status, which is useless because you are only seeing only Actions anyway.

What you want is a different value for “Group By field” to be retained for the following categories of display: project filters, time-related displays and status filters. In other words, there should be 3 pairs of Group+Sort settings, rather one.

http://www.activeinboxhq.com Andy Mitchell

Hi Teleo,

You’ve nailed it! I’ll do this in the next release.

Mark Montonara

The update for the dating is great in concept. My downloaded update does not seem to update the dates though. It goes to a pop up box that says what will be changed and deleted, but when I push the action button… nothing happens.

http://www.activeinboxhq.com Andy Mitchell

Hi Mark,

Which button is it failing on (what’s written on it)? And does it still fail after a Gmail refresh? Or do you get a message saying something like “Waiting for threads to download” (just above the button)?

Brad Couper

Hi Andy – same issue for me.

1. I follow the “Update Deadline Labels” button,
2. when prompted click “Update Deadline Labels” in the pop up box
3. I scroll to the bottom of the page where it tells which labels will change
4. I click the button that says “Complete the Updating of Deadline Labels”
5. Nothing happens

Seems like the button isn’t linking through to anything as it doesn’t give any action indicators.

Then if I close the dialogue box, the button to update labels remains, but the new ZD label appears in the e-mail – however the old dd mm label also remains in the e-mail.

See video for details: http://screencast.com/t/y2EmXKTiGrBr

Chrome details are:
Google Chrome16.0.912.75 (Official Build 116452) mOSWindowsWebKit535.7 (@103989)JavaScriptV8 3.6.6.15Flash11,1,102,55User AgentMozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/535.7 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/16.0.912.75 Safari/535.7

http://www.activeinboxhq.com Andy Mitchell

Thanks Brad,

If you go back to Gmail after it fails (click Escape), and go to the Support tab, do you see any warnings? If so – could you submit them and let me know?!

Brad Couper

Hi Andy – I just submitted that error log – 1.36am your time Fri Morning (maybe time for bed for you!)

Mike Gaughan

This happened to me too. I had the new dates with a recent update but this newest update has reverted back to the old system.
Mitch

I have a similar issue. It adds new-style dates for my couple hundred date-stamped messages, then gets stuck with 1 remaining to add. Cancelling out there, of course, doesn’t ever get to the “delteting old style labels” part so now I have both (presumably on all except 1 thread )

Romain Lenglet

Thanks for this great update! It’s great that the review bar opens now directly into active results. I always found it annoying to have to manually to into that view. I also love the new filtering in the active results view, it’s much more concise.
Moshe Blizinsky

thanks i “feel” its working much smoother and i love “Review Bar opens straight into Active Results” keep it up
John Bowen

I am not seeing the Today/Overdue buttons in 4.0.4.3 inside Chrome.

http://www.activeinboxhq.com Andy Mitchell

Hi John,

Are you getting any errors in the Support tab? If so can you report them and let me know?

John Bowen

Hi Andy:
I just realized that installing 4.0.4.3 removed my password for Plus.. providing my password fixed the issue! Sorry to alarm.

Nathan Sudds

Looking great Andy! Thanks for keeping the color in the labels this time — it’s a small thing but makes a HUGE difference for me personally. I really like how things are looking.

One question, should the HAB at the top of the ActiveResults be showing me a “Finish” button? I’m not seeing the Checkmark option I was hoping for to bulk complete something. Is that possible? Am I missing something… ?

This looks amazing though… I can’t wait to use it, it’s a great improvement like others are saying… clean, simple… a few small alignment issues (I’m using one of the HD wood themes right now )

Excited to find that complete/finish button that would help me a lot in my bulk processing. Now just to get this hab at the top of the Inbox too!
http://www.netsprinter.com Lyena Solomon

Active Results for some reason do not support Gmail keyboard shortcuts. That’s the only reason I stay in Gmail Results. I use J and K and X keys to move around my boxes and mark emails.
Ben Van Zee

thanks, but there’s a usability problem here (or maybe I have one of my settings wrong). When I try to group by Deadline, I have 3 overdue emails from yesterday (Due Jan 11th) and it doesn’t group them as one day, it shows me 3 separate lines for each overdue email.
http://twitter.com/Manaburner Michael Roesch

Maybe I missed something, but what happend to “Upcoming”? Has it been replaced or removed?

http://www.activeinboxhq.com Andy Mitchell

Hi Michael,

It was replaced with simply Future, on the basis that if you sort by Deadline, it organizes by the soonest first.

Does this work for you?

http://twitter.com/Manaburner Michael Roesch

Hi Andy,

ok I see.

Please correct me, if I’m wrong but isn’t that the same as “Scheduled”? At least in my case, it displays the same emails.

The good thing about “Upcoming” for me was, that I could see, that the next two or three days, there would be something coming up (pardon the pun).
In my style of working, I only care about events not being more than 3 days in the future.

Is “Future” based on the same time frame, i.e. does it only show events coming in the next 2-3 or maybe 4 days? If so, I could live with that.

Anonymous

Not seeing others having the issues but I can’t use the buttons bar while in a conversation, clicking on next or waiting on does nothing. Also the group by drop downs don’t populate with text so i don’t know which group is for what until I click on it. The quick access buttons to the right are also not showing up properly they show up eventually once the text in the group buttons shows up. If I use an older version of AIB it works ok. Any ideas? I signed up for plus because it would fix these issues but so far no good. Also dates are not being saved when I click on “today” button or set other date.

Thanks,

http://www.activeinboxhq.com Andy Mitchell

Hi jcoeng,

This looks seriously wrong! There should not even be a Today button… Whatever is going wrong is very serious.

Can you email me, andym at activeinboxhq.com ?

Specifically with:
1) Which version of ActiveInbox are you using?
2) What browser do you use?
3) If you click the Support button in the top right, does it tell you you have warnings?

I will be able to get you sorted, it just might take some diagnostics to get us there!
Andy

Anonymous

Hello Andy, I emailed you 2 times already but no response so I just wanted to check and ensure you are receiving them.

1.) 4.0.4.3
2.) Chrome 16.0.912.75 m
3.) Oh yeah, last night I sent you an email with approx 1600 errors, I’ve sent them in several times now.
4.) Win 7 x64

It is still unusable for me as its intended.

Please let me know what I can do to help solve this more.

Thanks,

Anonymous

Is it possible to reorder the group drop down lists? thanks.

http://profiles.google.com/susan.penter Susan Penter

Great work Andy it looks fantastic.
This would be good (when you get something great you always look how to be even better lol) at the moment it is alphabetical ie Action, Next Action, Someday, Waiting on. Whereas Next Action, Waiting On, Action then Someday would be better for productivity.

http://twitter.com/TimNikolaev Tim Nikolaev

THIS IS AWESOME! I have been waiting for proper sorting and label colors for a while. Thanks Andy!
Jason

Group by Project is not showing up unless the category is named Projects and not changed. I tried removing my Project category and then recreate it named Projects with a prefix P/ and the Group by still does not show Project. The only way I get Project group by to work is to uninstall 4.0.4.3 and install it again leaving the default Project category.
Bill B

So far I like what I see but based on posts, I am not really using this to its fullest capabilities. Is there a video tutorial on how to use ALL the features of ActiveInbox?
Lena Rotenberg

LOVE ActiveInbox — trial period for Plus about to run out and I’ll definitely buy it — and LOVE the capabilities of this new version. All working A-OK! The one improvement I’d like to see is easily renaming labels such as Projects, References etc. On my large desktop monitor everything shows well, but on laptop I loose an entire horizontal line because I can’t shorten “References” into “Ref” and so forth. Thanks for a great product. I’m hooked!

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