Hello

As you know, we’ve been having issues with the HAB missing and for some people on Chrome, the Archive/Send/Delete isn’t working or buttons are missing. I thought I’d put an update on here (my first blog post!) to explain what’s gone on and what we’re doing about it.

Missing HAB

This is primarily a problem with Preview Pane which is a real ‘pain’ as Andy’s been working on getting it integrated as  a standard feature but due to an update from Gmail, it’s knocked out some user’s HAB.

The HAB won’t show at the moment if you’ve got Preview Pane enabled. For now, until the integration is working, the quick solution is to disable it completely in Labs: https://mail.google.com/mail/#settings/labs

Quick Note: It’s not enough just to switch the Preview Pane view to the classic view using the dropdown, you have to go into Labs and disable it there.

Archive/Send/Delete on Chrome

Some Chrome users are having a problem with Action+MoveNext (e.g. Archive/Send/Delete/etc. not working. Andy has now (after 15 hours!) fixed this and anytime now will be releasing an update which will sort this out.

Thanks to everyone for letting us know about issues and for the detailed explanations we get which is fantastic as it makes fixing ‘stuff’ so much easier!

Keep an eye on the blog  for details about updates and new ‘stuff’ (can you tell I’m an anti-geek?).

As always if you’ve got any issues, suggestions or questions, drop me an email and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can. With suggestions, it’s brilliant when people put them on our GetSatisfaction board as other people join in with their own take on how they use AIB and I learn more from the forums than anywhere.

Lisa

I’ve just released a tiny update to let ActiveInbox work with Firefox 7 (and 8, as it goes). Firefox should offer you the auto-update, but if it complains, you can manually update from http://www.activeinboxhq.com/install.php

(Chrome users, breathe a sigh of relief… you have a sensible browser that never gets upset about version numbers!).

So this is both a minor announcement and a giant feeling of relief!

The minor announcement is that, thanks to Jonathan, Wesley, Mark and everyone else who mentioned it this morning, I’ve been able to fix up a Gmail change that made the HAB disappear in conversations.

The giant rush of relief is that this is the first true test of the brand new instant-update system I’ve been building. For the first time in our history, it means that even if you don’t go and upgrade to 4.0.2.29, then just by refreshing Gmail you should notice that the HAB instantly starts working again!!

In the grand scheme of things, this has paved the way for seamless fixes: a few hours of downtime while we detect and fix the problem, then a reload of Gmail and all is sorted *

* Quick disclaimer, it’ll help in (my arbitrarily chosen figure of) 80% of problems. It’s still possible the problem will be deeper than the instant-fix system can handle and we’ll need to do a proper update. When that happens, all the regular update reminders are still in place. Just so you know!

In response to a lot of the feedback coming to Lisa via email and Get Satisfaction, I’ve tidied up some less-urgent-but-still-very-irritating issues.

For those of you who are curious about the guts & schematics of what was fixed:

• It seems some people’s Gmail dates the sending of emails differently to the actual time (it rounds it to the nearest minute), so pre-labeling was failing for them (AIB checks the date to make sure the email it labels has only just been sent). This is less sensitive now, so no more warnings about “The email you just sent could not be labeled”.
• When you viewed an email from the ‘Active Results’ tab (including Top Priority and To Do items), the move next/back buttons were sending you back to the results page, rather than the next conversation. This is now fixed.
• Send & Archive occasionally complained that you had not saved the draft, even though the proper email was sent. It will no longer alarm people with this message!

I deployed this on Friday, so everyone should have auto-updated by now!

I’ve just prepped & released an update to stop the ActiveInbox Reviews box (the sidebar) from becoming unclickable about 2 minutes after you load.

You can download it from http://www.activeinboxhq.com/install.php

(Thanks to Hasit, Anthony, Jon and everyone else who pointed it out).

If you’re interested in what happened, technically, there was a failsafe timer that kicked in after 2 minutes to check everything had loaded correctly (ironically, this is part of the brand new stability system). Unfortunately, that timer was causing ActiveInbox to double load, and in the process, fight with itself to the death. Stealthily, it sidestepped the QA launch-checks by not occurring until a couple of minutes after load. Ultimately, the real root of the problem was that yesterday’s release was rushed – sorry about that. I think the takeaway lesson is never do updates at 2am!

Okay, this took a lot longer than usual to update – an 9 hour slog in total, but it’s ready now!

It fixes the missing HAB in conversations, which started happening overnight on some accounts.

You can grab 4.0.2.24 from the Install Page.

And, much MUCH more excitingly, it’s the first ever version capable of truly fast updates in the future. So, if we have another Gmail change, fingers crossed, you might not have to lift a finger to update ActiveInbox!

Update 1/09/2011
I’ve just released 4.0.2.25 to counter the unclickable sidebar issue: http://www.activeinboxhq.com/blog/2011/09/01/fixing-the-unclickable-sidebar-issue-activeinbox-4-0-2-25/

Just fixing up a Gmail change that disabled the HAB in conversations – it’s got a few nasty sharp edges though, so might take another 2hrs! Blog/Twitter post to follow.

Update 31/08/2011
This is now fixed, please see http://www.activeinboxhq.com/blog/2011/08/31/important-update-fix-missing-hab/

This is a follow on to last week’s “Thoughts On Gmail’s Preview Pane“, with a concrete proposal for the next big ActiveInbox update.

Let us first disclaim ourselves: normally for Labs, especially ones as extensively breaking as Preview Pane, we can’t support them. BUT it seems Preview Pane has struck a chord. So, to balance those two things, I want to make some changes that are generally beneficial to all AIB users, but also make things work better for Preview Pane users.

Jettisoning The Dead Weight

The inbox/search-results row cube will not survive. I find it increasingly to be ugly, dysfunctional and meaningless (actually, it’s main crime is being a meaningless symbol, those other attributes are just a by-product of that). I will keep the ability to right click a thread and see a preview popup; although it’s low priority and it may be a while before it works fully with the many new inboxes that Gmail is showcasing (“Classic”, “Important First”, etc.).

Seizing Control

Most importantly, we want super fluid control of Statuses, Deadlines, Projects etc. in the inbox/search-results view.

One popular idea is to add the HAB to the header, but that adds an awful lot of vertical space and unnecessary duplication for people who don’t want the full HAB in this view. If it gets included at all, it should be toggle-able. (The two advantages I can think of for having it: at-a-glance visualisation of a conversation’s status, and the calendar for deadline selection).

A more elegant step is to extend the power of the standard Gmail ‘Labels‘ dropdown. The tricky bit is deadlines. But given the discussions we had in the last blog post about Deadlines, I think we will restructure the deadlines labels into the single-label format of D/yyyymmdd (e.g. D/20110823 for the day I posted this). With this, the Labels dropdown could be used to just type out the date.

We could also augment it to recognise special keyword terms like ‘today’ and ‘tomorrow’; maybe even adding these visually to the bottom of the menu.

Lingering Shadows Of The New Preview Pane

The one thing that’s going to be really difficult in the new Preview Pane is the ‘Conversation Notes’ and the ‘Previous Emails’ feature, because I can’t easily detect which conversation is actually being viewed.

So, for the time being, Conversation Notes and Previous Emails are going to be dropped for users of the Preview Pane lab. Hopefully we can bring them back later.

Liberated! By The Keyboard Resistance

The main reason I’ve not yet got around to keyboard shortcuts is indecision about which keys to use; and who will remember them. In fact, I must confess I’m hopeless at remembering the shortcut keys in Gmail.

Due to this combination – of not having many keys to choose from and the difficulty in recalling the keys we introduce – I’m proposing instead we get Alfred inspired.

The keyboard director will popup when you press a configurable combination (e.g. ctrl+m), and then you can begin typing to auto-complete where you want to go. E.g. if you enter a label, and you’re in a conversation that doesn’t have it, the first choice will be to add it; the second choice to search for it; the third choice to preview it in a floating popup and so on.

The most useful bit of this is that it’ll have two keys to complete: Enter will simply do it; Tab will do it and then reset the keyboard director so you can type the next command… effectively enabling you chain commands together.

What do you think?

Have I made any glaringly bad assumptions? What will add the most value for you?

It’s very clear from a lot of your feedback – and I readily agree – that we could improve the ‘Archive/Delete/etc. >’ buttons on the Horizontal Action Bar (aka HAB).

However, exactly what is wrong is hard to define. There are many different kinds of minor complaints thrown at it, which include:

• It duplicates Gmail’s own crisply-clickable Archive button: a confusing waste of precious screen real estate.
• The interaction of ‘dropdown on mouseover’ is fiddly, and it works better permanently in the right-hand sidebar (where the ads and People Viewer is).
• The ‘Archive >’ button would work better being first on the HAB for easier access, before the Status buttons
• There should be an option to change the default from ‘Archive’ (e.g. ‘Delete’).
• The ‘<' and '>‘ arrows are confusing, and the user does not know what will happen.

The underlying message is that a fair % of ActiveInbox users do not use the button, and therefore it takes up too much room.

Taking a step back, what was the original intent?

1. It is part of the Inbox Zero flow: you work the HAB from left to right, adding a Status or Deadline, assigning to a Project or Context, and then clearing it out the inbox and moving to the next message. However:
   • We don’t always need to defer it with a Status/Deadline, very often we just want to discard it, so the archive/delete should be the first thing on the HAB.
   • When we’re working through non-inbox items (e.g. our Action list), there is no use for ‘Archive’. Just ‘Finish’ and ‘Next’ really matter.
2. It reduces procrastination, as the presence of the Move-Nexter arrow gives you the per-message choice to go back to the inbox, or keep progressing through the messages without interruption.

Some ideas for improvements to get us started:

• Go for complete Keyboard Control, where you can apply a Status/Deadline/Project (using Enter to do just one action, and Tab to do the action and then do another one), then use the keyboard shortcut to ‘Archive and Move Next’. Drop the ‘Archive >’ dropdown from the HAB.
• When you mouse over the regular Gmail Archive/Delete/Spam buttons, a hover appears with a button that lets you select to < or > and move on after selection. Drop the ‘Archive >’ dropdown from the HAB.
• Introduce a new row that has a countdown timer and 3 options: Do It, Defer, Delete (and move next). Drop the ‘Archive >’ from the HAB. This might even be a new addon.
• Reduce the size of the ‘Move-Nexter’, so it’s just an icon. When you mouse over it, it opens up all options (Archive/Delete/etc.).
  • Make it possible to hold Shift when you click a Status, Deadline or Project, that automatically moves you to the next item. (Or even make this a full time option).
  • Move the ‘Archive >’ to the right-hand sidebar (at the risk it might clash with People Viewer, Rapportive, etc.)
• Just keep as is, but increase the clarity/clickability of the buttons with a design refresh.

What would you have done to the Move Nexter?

All thoughts and suggestions welcome – even if they’re off-list. I’d love to know how you use the Move Nexters, how you process your inbox (a story of your day is always useful), and what you’d do if the Move Nexters were removed?

I’ve just released 4.0.2.22 in response to people finding their Horizontal Action Bar disappearing.

This feels a little like a wolf running into the field just before I managed to herd the last sheep into the pen…

You see, we’re about 6 hours away from finishing the auto-updater to handle Gmail changes (which when ready, will mean you never have to manually update ActiveInbox again for small glitches like this), but I had to halt production and get this fix out before the majority of the US wakes up!

The next update will be tomorrow. For now, you can grab 4.0.2.22 from the Install page.