A word on the radio silence

If you’re observant you will have noticed that we tweeted more than two weeks ago that this release was “just a day away”; it turns out exuberant optimism was mocking (and possibly cursing) us. I’ve virtually worked around the clock since then, and we are still not quite there, but enough is enough and it’s time to open the kimono.

Before we go any further, please bear in mind this is not yet public. It’s a preview for the blog – for you – and if there’s any thoughts or opinions you have, please let me know (good or bad), and we can factor them in very quickly.

The New Name

Late last year you gave us a sackful – two sackfuls – of wonderful suggestions for a new name, inspired by the great fear that the benevolent beast of GTD might one day stamp on us for using its name. Despite ranging from the fanciful to the downright bizarre, we ended up going with a fairly straight replacement: ActiveInbox.

The one thing that matters is…. the name change does not signal anything uncomfortable. The basic feature set will remain exactly the same, Plus users will glide effortlessly to the new name/website, and the essential purpose is still to use GTD concepts to manage email.

It simply means we can tell the world about what we’re doing.

The New Website

Naturally, with a new name there is a new website. This is the work of Pete and it looks amazing.

The website (http://www.activeinboxhq.com) has all new text, and most importantly, a new Workflow page (http://www.activeinboxhq.com/better_email.html).

It is isn’t finished yet, we’ve still got to move over the blog (which is still working on gtdinbox.com).

Your feedback/requests/gut-reactions here are much welcomed.

New Features

As long-term GTDInbox users, I think you will spot the improvements very quickly. Therefore I will be brief!

Upgraded Reviews Sidebar
You requested we restore the one-click ability to see all Active items (all Status/deadline emails in a project/context); and so we have. Also, as many of you asked for it, we’ve reintroduced the exclusion of all S/Finished emails from the search results. We’ve also cleaned up the UI so it feels more sturdy.

New Conversation Sidebar and Horizontal Action Bar
Our goal with the conversation view was to make it tidier and easier to spot, at a glance, what is going on with a conversation (its status, its schedule, its category). And to make it easier to expand in the future with new functionality.

Pinning Labels for Fast Processing
Amongst the new functionality is the ability to ‘pin’ labels to the UI for rapid selection. This is very useful for processing, where you might be focused on, or experiencing a lot of email around, a small set of projects or contexts at any given time.

The Preview popup in the inbox has been given a visual overhaul.

New ‘File’ Button in the header
And, in the Inbox, search results, and conversations there is a new ‘File’ button in the header; for easy GTD status/project/schedule filing.

New ‘Related Items’ and ‘Previous Emails’
The big, BIG new addition is Related Items. When in a conversation, you can click the button in the Conversation Sidebar to see all emails related to the one you are viewing, including outstanding actions and exchanged files.

It works by showing you all emails associated with the current contact and/or labels (e.g. project).

As a side thought, it is also interesting at a high level, because it lets you see the connections between emails (“across” emails), rather than just looking down from your archive or inbox.

With equal utility, you can now see “Previous Emails” (another kind of related emails) when you write a reply or compose a new email; so that you can see recent discussions to make small talk or check on progress, see if you have any history whatsoever (if you have lots of incoming email) and check there are no outstanding actions you have forgotten to do.

Improved “Send and File” and New “Label Suggestions”
For Plus users, the “Send and…” button has been overhauled to “Send and File” with a cleaner UI, so that every time you send an email or a reply, you can update the status with ease, keeping the system accurate at all times. And, there is a new ‘Label Suggestions’ feature that suggests categorization automatically for a new conversation (using previous labels for a contact, and text in the conversation itself – we are still refining this!).

A Quick Note About the Status Button Updates…

You will notice the biggest change is that we have removed the “Horizontal Action Bar” (the one with the blue Status buttons in the conversation view).

This is possibly a little controversial, but we do believe the new UI is the right direction. It’s cleaner and can be expanded more in the future. However, it does add more clicks in certain cases.

We’re very much listening on this, and I think we have a way to go to get it exactly right.

In the meantime, the existing buttons are still available from the Preferences, by checking the checkbox “Classic Horizontal Action Bar in Conversations” and reloading Gmail. But, please do not do this until you have given the new UI a chance! And if you do go back, let us know why in the new community forum.

New Focus

For the last month and a half we’ve been dedicating all our (still limited!) resources to getting to this milestone; so that we can reduce our mental/work clutter and focus on just a single product and its improvements. Now we have reached the milestone, we are restructuring to dedicate the majority of our time on support – to be support heavy – and next we will be expanding the team to increase development capacity for new features.

At the heart of this change of direction is our new Community Forum. This is designed to replace the existing forum (which was riddled with spam), UserVoice (which was useful but limited in what it could do) and to an extent, email (which is wonderful, but not effective for group discussion and helping lots of people at once!).

One Last Thing

Thank you! Your support has been the only thing that has enabled us to keep updating and evolving ActiveInbox (and GTDInbox before it). I am deeply humbled by it all, and I’m very excited about what we can do this year (and beyond!) with the momentum you have given us.

Downloading ActiveInbox

Please go to the new website to install it for Firefox or Chrome: http://www.activeinboxhq.com/install.html

Hi all,

This morning Gmail did a change that stopped us being able to count the number of active items (those with a Status or Deadline) in your account; as well as the Inbox Preview popup. I’ve just got it fixed (links below).

Just a quick word on what else is going on…

First, support emails. We’re juggling a little bit here, mostly because I’m constantly switching between development, customer support, feature design and the background business stuff. The important bit is I listen to everything we receive; but right now I’m prioritizing coding fixes and updates and then trying to respond when I get the opportunity — which means it can take a while (I go as fast as possible!). I do feel this frustration acutely. We’re focusing on getting the product to the point where the feature set has hit full usefulness to the work day, and we can bring in the revenue that will enable us to provide great support. We are getting there! (The one thing we always ensure is that if there’s a major Gmail change – as there was earlier today, we have an “all stop” where we drop everything to get it fixed and shipped).

Recently, Pete and I have been focused on a major update to GTDInbox: a website overhaul, some major new features, and the new name. This also includes a lot of the feedback you’ve provided us on the new Reviews sidebar, and the Dashboard/Popup. The next big blog post will preview what’s coming!

Installing 3.0.22.11 for Firefox

Please go to http://www.gtdinbox.com/gettingstarted.htm

Installing 3.0.22.11 for Chrome

This is important – Chrome can have difficulties upgrading addons, so we suggest you close Gmail, uninstall the old GTDInbox, and then install the latest version.

To install, please download http://www.gtdinbox.com/gtdinbox_3-0-22-11.crx to your computer, and then open the file with Chrome (by dragging the file onto a Chrome window, and clicking ‘continue’ in the bottom left).

It appears Gmail is upgrading again. The Inbox Preview and the Review’s Sidebar action-counts have stopped working (as of Tue 4th May). Aiming to get it fixed today, and a patch released.

As some of you have noticed, in the redesign of 3.0.22.x we removed the ‘Dashboard’ and ‘Label / Search Popup Browser’ from the sidebar.

The reason was simple, the popup had fallen behind all the other features and was becoming clunky, especially compared to just using Gmail’s native search. Due to the complexity (time required) of maintaining it, we trimmed it while we decided what could be improved with it.

It’s also interesting that so few people noticed its disappearance, signaling that we were underperforming with it (i.e. it was not well designed).

Personally, I broke the pro’s and con’s into the following:

Pros

• You could see search results, and preview conversations, without stopping what you were doing in Gmail.
• It was fast because it pre-loaded all action messages (but Gmail has become fast anyway).

Cons

• The popup interface was hard to read, and hard to use. It was easier to use Gmail’s native search from GTDInbox’s sidebar. This was partly due to the colours we used, and partly due to the fact that the list of conversations occupied too much vertical space (2 lines for a row instead of one).
• The ability to group messages by Project and Contact was a nice idea, but was too clunky to be useful in practice. More seriously, it required all messages to be downloaded in order to work (rather than just the most recent 20 messages), which was slow.

My question then, for those who liked it, is what did you like about it? Why did you use it? What made it better than just searching in Gmail?

Once we better understand how you valued it, we can redesign it to be much more useful, or make more improvements to normal Gmail search.

I’m rapidly running out of minor update digits here, so I hope this truly is the last one until we can roll out some new features

I’m rapidly running out of minor update digits here, so I hope this truly is the last one until we can roll out some new features

Thanks ever so much to Chuck Mattsen, for reporting that 3.0.22.8 could not load on his (and other peoples) machines. With his excellent error information, I’ve been able to track it down and get it fixed asap.

Installing 3.0.22.10 for Firefox

Please go to http://www.gtdinbox.com/gettingstarted.htm

Installing 3.0.22.10 for Chrome

This is important – Chrome can have difficulties upgrading addons, so we suggest you close Gmail, uninstall the old GTDInbox, and then install the latest version.

To install, please download http://www.gtdinbox.com/gtdinbox_3-0-22-10.crx to your computer, and then open the file with Chrome (by dragging the file onto a Chrome window, and clicking ‘continue’ in the bottom left).

Thanks to everyone who reported the issues that appeared with 3.0.22.7.

Delete+MoveNext (and Inbox Preview labeling) Stopped Working
This was a change with Gmail – the same change I thought we’d dealt with fully in 3.0.22.7 – that was technically much more subtle and a little rare (it only appeared on one of our accounts). It’s now properly fixed.

Over Zealous Error Warning Box for Multiple Inbox Users
I personally believe that the error box is such a great addition – and has led to big leaps forward in stability over the last few months – but that isn’t to say I don’t also realise it can be irritating

Due to the trickiness of working over Gmail, we have to try and detect/predict when Gmail is changing. This is not a precise art, and we have to do a little guess work (technically, ‘heuristics’).

Naturally, that comes with a trade off (a little like a spam filter): if we are too rigorous, we risk triggering errors when there isn’t really a problem. And if we are too easy going, Gmail changes without us realising, causing errors to ripple elsewhere in GTDInbox that are harder to understand (and take longer to fix).

That’s a lot of explanation for what is a very simple fact! In the last release, I added some error detection that was over-sensitive for multiple inbox users and triggered lots of irritating – but ultimately harmless – error warnings. It’s now been scaled back.

Installing 3.0.22.10 for Firefox

Please go to http://www.gtdinbox.com/gettingstarted.htm

Installing 3.0.22.10 for Chrome

This is important – Chrome can have difficulties upgrading addons, so we suggest you close Gmail, uninstall the old GTDInbox, and then install the latest version.

To install, please download http://www.gtdinbox.com/gtdinbox_3-0-22-10.crx to your computer, and then open the file with Chrome (by dragging the file onto a Chrome window, and clicking ‘continue’ in the bottom left).

No sooner had I said that 3.0.22.6 would be the “last update for a while”, Gmail goes ahead and updates itself! So, to get things back on track, please install 3.0.22.7. The new “last update for a while”

Installing 3.0.22.7 for Firefox

Please go to http://www.gtdinbox.com/gettingstarted.htm

Installing 3.0.22.7 for Chrome

This is important – Chrome can have difficulties upgrading addons, so we suggest you close Gmail, uninstall the old GTDInbox, and then install the latest version.

To install, please download http://www.gtdinbox.com/gtdinbox_3-0-22-7.crx to your computer, and then open the file with Chrome (by dragging the file onto a Chrome window, and clicking ‘continue’ in the bottom left).

A Note on New Features (the brand new sidebar and deadline/schedule features)

If you haven’t been introduced to the new features yet, please see http://blog.gtdinbox.com/2010/04/14/sneak-peek-gtdinbox-3-0-22-with-a-brand-new-sidebar-and-a-big-surprise/

In what I hope is the last of the recent rapid releases, we have 3.0.22.6 ready to go.

Thank you to everyone who submitted error reports from 3.0.22.5 and before, we fixed several more glitches, including the inability of the sidebar to show labels with a custom prefix (e.g. @ for contexts).

As with the previous releases, behind the scenes this is quite a big step forward, and I strongly urge you to upgrade!

Installing 3.0.22.6 for Firefox

Please go to http://www.gtdinbox.com/gettingstarted.htm

Installing 3.0.22.6 for Chrome

This is important – Chrome can have difficulties upgrading addons, so we suggest you close Gmail, uninstall the old GTDInbox, and then install the latest version.

To install, please download http://www.gtdinbox.com/gtdinbox_3-0-22-6.crx to your computer, and then open the file with Chrome.

A Note on New Features (the brand new sidebar and deadline/schedule features)

If you haven’t been introduced to the new features yet, please see http://blog.gtdinbox.com/2010/04/14/sneak-peek-gtdinbox-3-0-22-with-a-brand-new-sidebar-and-a-big-surprise/

Hot on the heels of 3.0.22.4, I’ve sorted through the problems you’ve reported and got as many as possible fixed.

I’ve actually managed to go pretty deep on the hunt for problems (it ended up taking over the entire day), and uncovered some fairly long-standing and low level issues. I’m a little embarrassed it has taken this long to notice them – and I won’t bore you with the gory technical details – but I hope this has led to more stability in some exceptional circumstances as well as a small boost in speed! (I’ve also found & fixed the problem that made the text editor freeze in Firefox when you clicked Compose Self).

I strongly suggest you upgrade to 3.0.22.5 as soon as possible.

Up next, a few more minor glitch fixes, and then back on with developing new features to add more control to your email.

Installing 3.0.22.5 3.0.22.6

For Firefox, please go to http://www.gtdinbox.com/gettingstarted.htm

For Chrome, please uninstall your current version of GTDInbox, then download and open (with Chrome) http://www.gtdinbox.com/gtdinbox_3-0-22-6.crx

If you haven’t heard about the new sidebar and deadline features in 3.0.22.x yet…

Please see the previous blog post, http://blog.gtdinbox.com/2010/04/14/sneak-peek-gtdinbox-3-0-22-with-a-brand-new-sidebar-and-a-big-surprise/

This is a bug fixing update, fixing a Gmail change that was making the sidebar disappear for some of you, ensuring the correct counts of ‘active items’ in the sidebar, and many more little bits and pieces.

Rob and Chuck mentioned in a blog comment that we ought to have a dedicated communication channel for keeping everyone up to date on what we’re doing internally with development; and they’re absolutely correct. It feels excessive to use a blog post for such little updates, so Twitter would probably be the best format (but do let me know if the volume of updates becomes intrusive).

The next few updates look something like this:

1) Release another bug fixing update based on the feedback from 3.0.22.4 (the most major problem I’m aware of is that, in Firefox, “Compose Self” temporarily freezes the text editor).

2) Create a new ‘action bar’ in conversations. I’m going to do a blog post on this imminently to discuss the proposed changes before we start development on them – but I do think it’s a strong improvement!

Installing 3.0.22.4 3.0.22.6

For Firefox, please go to http://www.gtdinbox.com/gettingstarted.htm

For Chrome, please uninstall your current version of GTDInbox, then download and open (with Chrome) http://www.gtdinbox.com/gtdinbox_3-0-22-6.crx

If you haven’t heard about the new sidebar and deadline features in 3.0.22.x yet…

Please see the previous blog post, http://blog.gtdinbox.com/2010/04/14/sneak-peek-gtdinbox-3-0-22-with-a-brand-new-sidebar-and-a-big-surprise/