Another quick updates…

Bug Fixes

The New Compose Frame No Longer Gets Covered

I’m embarrassed to report this has taken FOREVER to get right. In fact, I believe this is the 5th attempt.

But we’ve got a working solution: the compose frame is now ‘over the top’ of everything else. I cannot control its height, but it no longer goes behind the header.

It does mean it can theoretically still obscure things in the header, but in the rare situation you’re both composing an email, and want to access something on the header, you can just minimise the new composition. Easy!

“Compose Self” is Restored in Old Compose

I must hold my cap in hand and ask forgiveness here… Tom & I were under the impression that Google had fully removed the old Compose view from Gmail, and as such we stopped supporting it.

We were actually wrong, they’d just introduced the new Compose Frame to all users. As you can still revert Gmail to the old Compose view, I’ve reinstated ActiveInbox’s support for it.

Notes Are Back in Active Results

For reasons I’ll soon be incredibly happy to reveal, we’d temporarily removed support for Notes in Active Results. But that was premature, and they’re now back.

And something new… ‘Recent Projects’ in the Projects dropdown

This is a little change, oft-requested: the last 3 projects you selected are now shown at the top of the Projects dropdown, to make them easy to select again (on the basis you’re probably working with them).

Hello all,

Last week became a big bug fixing effort. Nothing particularly exciting here (unless the bug was causing you problems!), but see if anything takes your fancy below…

Stop the line through the Compose button

This problem has driven me bonkers for months. This is a totally fresh approach to solving it, and I’m hopeful we’ve got it this time

Stop Compose box getting ‘lost’ behind Gmail’s navigation header

I spent all of last week telling people by email that this wasn’t something we could solve, that Gmail’s compose box was too complex, and to wait until V5 came out (which will have the option of using less vertical space).

Stop the calendar in Compose from overlaying the sidebar

This was quite a rare problem, and took me ages to recreate, but essentially in some circumstances, if you opened the deadline calendar while composing an email, it could overlay Gmail’s own right-hand sidebar, which made the calendar inoperable. Fixed!

Ensure Active Results still loads even if you have 1,500+ todos in there

A foreword on this… you should NEVER have 1,500 todos The way ActiveInbox works, to keep things fast (and to make Grouping results possible) is to download all your todos when you load Gmail, and store them in memory. So, if you have too many, it just means you spend a minute or so waiting for the Review Bar to start working (to stop displaying the ‘-’ simple instead of the number of threads).

But in any case, there was a logical error that meant if you had 1,500, Active Results would never load. It’s now fixed!

Merge status labels if using both S/ and !

Many seasons ago, after much staring at the runes, I decided that ! was a better prefix that S/ for statuses (e.g. !Action rather than S/Action). It was aesthetically more pleasing, and it usefully put the status labels at the top of any folder list, which was useful on mobile.

We didn’t enforce this for existing users, it was just for new users.

Which was fine… except for the scenario where:
1) An existing user would uninstall ActiveInbox, wiping out your preferences for S/
2) They’d reinstall ActiveInbox, and it would be set up to look for !
3) But they still had S/ labels in Gmail.

This typically resulted in a mishmash of some ! and some S/ labels, which is all very confusing.

So if you have this problem, you can now go into our Preferences, click ‘Configure Label Types’, go to the Statuses tab, and it will tell you if it spots you having the two different types of prefixes, and offer to merge them all into whatever your chosen prefix is.

Oh, hello

I’m not sure why I’ve never thought of this before, and I’m sure there must be a flaw with it, but I’ve just been struck by what I hope could be a much more elegant approach to tracking things you’re Waiting On.

A separate ‘Waiting On’ status requires effort

In our support account, we have three statuses: L1 and L2, and Waiting On. And of course there are deadlines. (You know you can make custom statuses right? Just add a new label to Gmail starting with !, e.g. !L1).

If something is critical, we’ll put it in L1. When Lisa or I then reply to it, and we need a response, we move it from L1 to Waiting On.

Have you spotted the problem yet? Sure you have, you’re a smart cookie When someone replies, we have to move it back to a status for us to do. Not only is this a tedious step in itself, we have to remember which status it used to belong to… Was it L1? Or L2?

It’s simple, we kill the ‘Waiting On’

So, here’s my proposal…

We dispose of the ‘Waiting On’ status altogether, and we use the last person to reply to decide whether it’s To Do or Waiting On.

E.g. you add something to ‘Action’, or a deadline… and the Active Results splits into 2 sections: ‘To Do’ and ‘Waiting On’.
If you replied last, ActiveInbox automatically puts it in the ‘Waiting On’ section; or if they replied to you, it puts it into your ‘To Do’ section.

Potential Problems

1. Is there a situation where an email you replied to is still an action for you?
   
   E.g. if someone emails support, and I fire a response to say “I’ll get back to this in a few days”, AIB would now assume it’s Waiting On the contact (because I was the last to reply), when in fact it’s still for me to do.
2. How would the Review Bar decide what the ‘to do’ count is for a status like ‘Action’? Is it all active items? Or is it all items for me To Do? I think this is easy, it’s all active items (To Do + Waiting On).

Another way: Waiting On augments other statuses

I think problem #1 might be a deal breaker.

Another idea is to make ‘Waiting On’ a status that doesn’t cause other statuses to be removed.

So, you’d add an email to L1. And if you send a reply that needs a response, you add Waiting On, and the email would be ‘L1 + Waiting On’ (rather than removing L1, as it does now). Basically similar to above, but Waiting On is still a manual choice.

And to save you time, there could be an option that when/if they reply, Waiting On is automatically removed.

Over to you…

Does this problem resonate with anyone else? Where’s the pain for you?

Hey all,

Just a quick list of recent bugs you’ve reported:

• The ‘To’ field in the Compose box no longer loses initial focus. This was a frustration for many of you.
• When you reply, the Action Bar no longer overlaps anything below it.
• If you were having problems loading in Firefox, they’re all fixed (strange changes were afoot in the upcoming FF20).

It should have auto-updated already, but you can always upgrade manually from Install.

Hi all!

Tom has finally been able to port ActiveInbox to Safari. We’ve tested it heavily internally, but it works pretty differently to Chrome & Firefox, and so I still have a tiny concern it will behave like a screaming toddler in a supermarket once it hits the wild.

So if you’re keen and prepared to take a tiny gamble, please install it for Safari.

Let me know your experiences in the comments!

The Firefox development community have been fantastic. After all my talk of slaying dragons, they exuberantly got back to me and let me know that it wasn’t a bug at their end that stopped ActiveInbox connecting to our servers in Firefox 20.

Instead, they’d tightened their conformance to a Web specification, the only browser to do so (Mozilla, the company behind Firefox, believe deeply in an open, standards-based Web). And our website fell foul of the new specification.

I’ve since corrected the problem, and everything is working fine.

This has now been resolved thanks to the wonderfully speedy people in the Firefox development community. See http://www.activeinboxhq.com/blog/2013/02/27/firefox-20-is-a-ok/

A handful of you are on Firefox 20, which is only the beta release right now (it’s not mainstream), but in my eyes it’s a fire breathing dragon.

For some reason, and I think it’s a bug with Firefox, they’ve decided our website is broken. This means you can’t access http://www.activeinboxhq.com, because it declares “Corrupted Content Error”; and by extension, ActiveInbox cannot reach our server to log you into your Plus account.

I’ve filed a bug with Mozilla, at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=845273.

However, as Firefox 20 draws closer to conclusion, I’ll get progressively more ferocious in trying to slay said dragon, even if it means we have to assume responsibility at our end.

In the meantime, if you can avoid using beta Firefox with ActiveInbox, that would be super!

As we do another bug fixing release, the reasonably critical amongst you might ask “Why do bugs keep appearing
when I’m not seeing any new functionality?”. Ah ha! This is a question I feel I must answer

The truth is, a lot of the bugs have just been on the backlog for a while, and we’re clearing out the remaining – and mostly minor – ones as time becomes available. They’d be better called ‘glitches’ at this stage.

But every now and again a new bug does enter the arena, fighting fit and looking for trouble, and that’s because we’re building lots of powerful refinements for 4.1, which is now just around the corner (more on that in a few days!). Anytime a bug is serious, all work stops and we try to fix it within a day.

This is why we’ve been doing rolling releases for the last week, and I’ll summarise them below:

• Fixed the ‘Pinned Items Wrapping’ problem on the Review Bar. If you had a lot of pinned items, they’re wrap onto a new line in a way that was a dreadfully decadent waste of space.
• Fixed the ‘Duplicate Pinned Items’ bug. If you saw things like ‘Action’ repeatedly appearing on your top bar, this is now fixed. It was caused by the way we re-structured everything to fix the “Pinned Items Wrapping” issue above.
• Restored the “Always Display Note” preference in the Notes drop down. This disappeared in an act of over-enthusiasm for an improvement we’ve got coming in 4.1.
• Restored the ability to put “Move Nexter” buttons on the right hand side of the HAB.
• Fixed the bug where the ‘+’ icon (that leads to things like attaching images) in the reply box was obscured and hard to click. I’m genuinely sorry about this – it’s extremely rare that we cause a problem with Gmail’s own functionality, and we fixed it the moment we heard about it.

And as an extra nicety, because we try to make ActiveInbox like as customizable to your workflow as we can, the ‘Action Bar in Reply Box’ is now an optional preference.

It will be auto-updating as you read this – but a mere Gmail refresh away in Chrome – but if you want to do it manually, just click Install.

I’ve just added a new piece of functionality – the Action Bar is now in the Reply Box.

The most likely time that you’ll mark something as Waiting On, or declare something as finished (removing all statuses/deadlines), is when you’ve sent an email. Therefore we put the Action Bar nearby to both reduce the use of the mouse, and to act as a little visual reminder.

(You may have noticed it actually appeared over the weekend, but with visual glitches – sorry about that, I had actually only intended it to go to beta testers at that point!).

The other major fix was that some of you noticed that Action/Waiting On was being “auto-assigned”, starting on Monday. (If you’re geekily interested… In actual fact, it wasn’t being auto-assigned, it was just that when you clicked an email in the Inbox [mouse button down], the screen instantly changes to view the conversation, and a few milliseconds later you release mouse button [mouse button up], but inadvertently over one of the Status buttons – which triggered ActiveInbox to apply the status.)

You may also have noticed we have a new help button on the Action Bar in conversations, to give new users a really simple way to learn how ActiveInbox works.

In other news, I also:
* Fixed the “Send & Archive” button when you reply. It had stopped working over the weekend.
* Removed the ‘Send EOM’ button, as it’s universally disliked.
* Added support up until Firefox 22
* Increased the robustness of adding the Action Bar into the new Compose box (occasionally it would fail to be added)

Hi all,

We’re currently experiencing a little server downtime (our security certificate didn’t renew as expected), which should have only taken 30 minutes to fix, but is compounded by slow service by one of our suppliers (they have “Rapid” in the name, it’s apparently ironic!).

Fortunately, there is a simple temporary workaround if you’re comfortable with logging into your Plus account without encryption for a brief period…

1) Load https://www.activeinboxhq.com
2) You’ll get a warning about an expired certificate
3) Click ‘Proceed Anyway’ in Chrome, or ‘I understand the risks’ and ‘Add Exception’ and then ‘Confirm Security Exception’ in Firefox. (You can remove these Exceptions later).
4) Refresh Gmail – it should work just fine now.

If you don’t want to add a security exception, we’ll be back as normal as soon as we receive our new certificate – and I’ll be in the office until that happens (it’s 18:30 here now!).