Just a quick one!

This update addresses a few of the issues you reported in the blog comments yesterday:

• The todo counts update when you action/deadline something
• The Support/Preferences links are hidden until I’ve had time to implement them
• The chat icon doesn’t get pushed off the bottom of Gmail anymore

You can grab it from http://www.activeinboxhq.com/install_nlg.php.

Pinning Labels and the Sidebar?

One of the trickier questions that came up on yesterday’s post: what shall we do with pinned labels on the top bar?

Clearly using more vertical space is not an option; and would lose the very clean look.

1) Put the pinned labels at the top of the Projects dropdown (well, at the top of each label type’s dropdown).

2) Take greater control of Gmail’s existing facility for labels in the sidebar: Recent Labels. Rather than duplicate that functionality, we could have it so that when you pin a label, it’s definitely added to Recent Labels; and when you unpin a label, it’s removed. Furthermore, we could remove the prefix (e.g. P/) and possibly add a folder icon to indicate they’re AIB folders, and finally order them alphabetically.

Which would work for you?

Update Sunday 6 Nov at 12:06

Okay, from the blog comments I’m thinking I didn’t do a great job of explaining the proposals… let me try in more detail!

AIB Moved Out Of The Sidebar Because It Wasn’t Reminding Us…

So why did I pull AIB out of the sidebar? There’s two major reasons. First, it was simply not very easy to use: menus were prone to flying out without good reason, the sidebar is already really cluttered, and worst of all, it was very easy to ignore, so todos got missed. Second, the new Gmail made “being easy to ignore” 10x worse because of its dynamic scaling when you mouse over it. Essentially, new look Gmail pushed us out.

In short, it’s not a trivial for us to “turn the sidebar back on”. (And I don’t believe we want to…)

Auto-Hide Keeps Vertical Space To A Minimum

Now, I work with a small screen myself. So your main concern about using precious vertical space… I feel it too.

However, one idea I have at the moment is to – as a preference – dynamically hide certain features in the fixed-header-pane (the bit that includes the Google bar – the one that links to ‘Mail, Calendar, Docs, Google+, etc.’, our Reminder bar, Gmail’s search, etc.). Especially Gmail’s Google bar. It could be minimised until you mouse over it; it could re-appear when you’re in the inbox but hide itself at other times.

We Pin To Focus On Today’s Important Things

And to the question of pinning. Why do we pin? To get quick access to the thing we’re currently working on faster than anything else. The most common thing we’re likely to want to see.

There is also a difference between things we always want visible – the todo count of ‘Today’ for example, and the things we just want quick access to, such as a project you’re working on, which can be slightly less visible.

I think that having ‘pinned’ items appear at the top of the Review Bar dropdowns would give us this very elegantly.

We could also experiment with other forms of reminder, such as a timely “You have 6 actions over 1 day old”, “You have not looked at your Home context recently”, etc.

And if you’re a power user who doesn’t worry about vertical-space, we could also add a row for pinning items below the main bar.

We Can Pin Less If We Clean Up Old Projects

If we make it very easy to take a project label (or whatever), and say “this is old, take it out of my sight”, then we need to pin things less, because the regular list will be much more focused.

Having AIB Reviews in two places is fragmenting

A major reason I’m cautious about having ActiveInbox appear both in the top bar and the sidebar is that you lose track of where to look for things. Instead of just going for the top bar, you have to decide first if the thing you want is at the top or on the left.

This is why I think we need to spend some time with only the top bar, so we can get used to looking there; rather than the sidebar. If after a few weeks it’s really not working, we can reconsider.

One thing we could try would be to just put pinned items in the Gmail sidebar.

A wireframe of things we can do:

Hi all,

Is it still Thursday in America? I fear I may have overshot by about 11 minutes!

Today was another manic day, and we’re nowhere near finished… so consider this an “incomplete sneak preview” of what is developing, that will also enable you to use ActiveInbox on new look Gmail

It’s aimed at people who are comfortable with beta software and can handle visual glitches and maybe a bug or two. If that’s you, you can download it from http://activeinboxhq.com/install_nlg.php. (See? I’ve even used a geeky link… that’s how techy this release is!).

I’m hoping to get the proper release ready for Tuesday 8th November, which will complete the visual changes and start us rolling, with regular beta previews for our community, towards ActiveInbox 5…

Hey all,

The battle with Gmail’s New Look is entering its second day…

The last 17 hours have been a cliched coffee consuming flurry of activity that has given us the new Top Bar – finally letting it escape weeks of planning – and a HAB that once again works in conversations. As a by-product of all this I’ve managed to speed up some performance issues for those of you with many active emails, and even to reduce the overall size of ActiveInbox.

However, this is a huge job – bigger than I rather optimistically anticipated! – and so tomorrow I’ll be restoring the Active Results, “Send & Archive” and tackling the remaining loose ends…

And then there may just be a new release for everyone on the blog to try

Just a quick status update… ActiveInbox is partly broken in Gmail’s new look (which is very cool by the way!).

I’ve just got my hands on it, but it’s nearly 10pm here in the UK. I’m aiming to have something ready tomorrow to work with it.

In the meantime, you can tell Gmail to “Temporarily Revert To the Old Look”, by clicking the cog icon near the top right of the messages… and after doing this, you can switch forward again to the New Look. You might want to revert just to keep AIB working.

Just to brace you all, one of the big changes we’ve been planning is in production and will be released as part of this: the sidebar will become a “top bar” (just below the black Google bar). As well as being a lot cleaner (reducing ActiveInbox almost to just a Review Bar and a Horizontal Action Bar); it gives us more ways to deliver timely reminders for staying on top of email!

Hello!

We’ve just released an update to deal with the ‘Delete+Move Next’ bug that a few of you have reported. If you’re suffering, update straightaway (especially if you use Firefox, as that doesn’t auto-update quickly).

Thanks to Jonathan Baumgarten for being our tester, your help was well appreciated.

Should we change the Archive Move Next Button?

I’ve been talking to Andy about the function of the arrows on the Action & Move buttons.

At the moment the way the archive/next/delete works is that you see the text but you have to click on the arrow to advance. If you click the text then it takes you back to the inbox.

For me personally I find it all a bit fiddly and I’ve said to Andy I’d be more inclined to click either just the text to do what I want or anywhere in that area and expect it to work.

I’m looking for some feedback from you as to what you think?

• Are you happy with the way it is now – clicking only on the arrow to advance?
• Would you prefer it if there was one clickable button and having a choice in which direction you want the mails to auto advance in the preferences? This would avoid having to click on the tiny arrow?

Let me know what you think.

P.S. I hope you all notice we practice what we preach here – an inbox with only 5 items and one of those was a test email!

Lisa

Hello

I just thought I’d let you know that we’ve still got a problem with the Archive/Send/Delete Problem on Chrome for some people. It’s not related to the HAB issue we had a few days ago and Andy is on it to get a fix out as soon as possible.

As soon as I’ve got more info I’ll be back and update this post!

Lisa

**UPDATE** This is taking longer to fix than Andy first thought. He’s still on it to get it fixed but it seems to not affect everyone which is making it more complicated. At the moment I’m hoping it’s going to fixed Sunday UK time – if it isn’t going to be, then I’ll update here again.

Thanks to everyone for your patience – we will get there ASAP!

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!