ProductiveFirefox

The new GTDInbox is ready! Alas, no significant new features; but plenty of useful tweaks and a little more control over things.

Stability Updates
Preview should now work solidly on every email. This has never been possible before; but I tried a new technique and it is much more fool proof than the earlier methods.

We’ve got much better at bulk actions (using the More Actions dropdown). Again, there’s a new technique at work here; and it makes it much faster/more-robust at changing the Status on lots of messages at once.

The Modify Reviews screen is fully working again, including the ability to move things up & down (Thanks to André Branco).

Clicking Finished now removes all Status labels (that bug was introduced by a performance enchancement in 2.0.9.1, that now works correctly!).

The button shifting problem (noted in the forum), where the ‘Finished’ button got in the way, has been remedied by making it load faster.

Functional Improvements
I hope you’ll like this one! The Options have been improved to give you a lot more control of the UI. You can now choose which parts of GTDInbox you want to use (and hide the rest); as well as changing the label selectors from drop downs to inline (a lot of people have requested this at various times).
This sets us up nicely for the future by allowing more features to be added without overloading everyone’s screen.

A special thank you goes to Tim Lindsey, who probably holds the record for the largest number of consecutive, substantial donations (huge thanks Tim!); as well as being trusting enough to give me his personal account password in order to try and thwart the ‘Failed to Load’ problem. (On that note, I still don’t know what is causing it; it’s very strange; but the fix is in the last blog post).

Where next? There may be a 2.0.9.3 release (it really depends on the status of the Pro account), but I’ve now got everything I wanted out of the way to usher in 2.1. All the news and announcements will come through this blog!

Install 2.0.9.2

(Apologies to forum users, you’ve already got this update… nothing new just yet!).

Please find the (slightly overdue) patch to make GTDInbox work with Firefox 3 RC1 (and all later updates to Firefox 3). Huge plaudits to Sean Buscay (who saved me many hours) and Captbunzo for getting a patch out faster than me; I essentially rolled their work into this one.

I also made it install better for new users, as this version will be going up on Mozilla (who recently have been extending a warm hand our way, I’m pleased to report!). Specifically, when you install it will successfully add Status labels and get itself running at 100%; and if you ever delete your Status labels; you can click an ‘Install’ button in the Edit Labels screen.

I’m still officially ‘underground’ but if anyone has urgent requests, don’t hesitate to email me (I know some of you have been doing). GTDInbox 2.1 is still pushing forward and I’m loving it; but it’s such a big update that it’s going to need some polish.

You can download from http://gtdinbox.com/#install or download direct from (http://gtdinbox.com/gtdinbox_2-0-8-2.xpi).

All the best,
Andy

Things might be going a little slower than normal (see the last post), but a new version is ready all the same!

GTDInbox 2.0.7 first and foremost fixes the latest Gmail change that was starting to affect some users (all labels were categorised under ‘Misc’). But, it also continues the work that began in 2.0.6 to make it a little more responsive to problems. It is better at informing you when updates are ready, it can notify you if it detects any common internal problems with Gmail (e.g. failing previews, label renaming not working) and advise you how to fix them, and I fixed several bugs with label rules (e.g. if you remove S/Next Action, it now strips the star; and if you turn an Action into Next Action it will work in all cases, and a few other bugs that were blighting it). I haven’t yet fully cracked the FF3b/RTM (acronyms ahoy!) issue, but now only preview/auto-label is affected - i.e. you can now continue to modify labels using the Inbox Popup (right click in the inbox).

You can install it straight into Firefox over at GTDInbox.com

As ever, please head over to the forum to discuss any issues or ideas!

Update
I meant to say a huge thanks to Sebastian Stadil. I wasn’t actually able to experience the bug that was ruining Labels for lots of people, but Sebastian patiently went through the diagnosing process on my behalf, and essentially is the only reason GTDInbox got fixed so fast, so thank you Sebastian!

Update 17/04/2008
For those of you who want a direct link, try http://gtdinbox.com/gtdinbox_2-0-7.xpi

My apologies, I overlooked a more subtle bug in the 2.0.5 release caused by the same problem - which many of you were seeing as the Labels box constantly growing and growing… I didn’t actually experience that bug, but nonetheless, I have high hopes this will fix it

I also took the opportunity to make this work with Firefox 3 Beta 5, and continue my experiments with making GTDInbox handle Gmail changes better. More on that in a not-too-distant blog post.

You can manually install the new release from http://gtdinbox.com/gtdinbox_2-0-6.xpi

The Safe Way to Update:

1. Download the above .xpi file to your computer
2. In Firefox, click ‘Tools’ and then ‘Addons’.
3. In the window that pops up, select GTDInbox and click ‘Uninstall’
4. Restart Firefox
5. In Firefox, click ‘File’ and then ‘Open File’
6. Select the .xpi that you just downloaded
7. Click ‘Open’
8. The normal installation routine should now begin…

The Fast Way to Update:
Download the XPI then drag it onto Firefox

Hi all,

Just got back from a two day break with Sarah to discover Gmail has changed again. That was shockingly bad timing I’ll do what I can to have it fixed by the end of today.

I still believe we only see a bad Gmail change once a month; and they normally only take a few hours to address. (Most other problems are created by the fact I’m in a constant development cycle, so bugs do sometimes slip in.)

I understand that at least 500 of you lived through the 3 month beta programme - for which your feedback and patience was truly valuable - but you now demand a more relaxed, bug-free experience. Therefore, stability is the current #1 priority and will continue to be so in the very long term.

Unfortunately, and this isn’t a glib excuse, the truth is that GTDInbox really does bind tightly to Gmail - to do things like ‘preview’ requires some very complex coding - and hence it’s more sensitive to changes in Gmail’s core. I will try to isolate this better, so that if any part of GTDInbox fails in the future, it doesn’t bring the whole app down.
With regards to that complexity… in the very long term, I’ve given the Gmail guys a wishlist for an API that would make GTDInbox - and other Gmail Firefox addons - much more stable (and more powerful). Fingers crossed for that happening.

Everytime an update like this has to be done, I look for common patterns that would make GTDInbox respond to unforseen changes better in the future. I.e. theoretically the situation is improving. However, the best fix is still for me (or someone else who understands the code) to be on hand when the problems start so they can be fixed asap, and then pushed to the blog.

In summary? I’m doing my utmost to create a rock solid and adaptive foundation for GTDInbox so we can begin to build out the very cool features in the pipeline (both those suggested in the forum and the internal plans). And I’m listening!

Fixed a problem experienced by @edgautier and Scott Shuster where clicking various icons caused the Next Action label to be toggled incorrectly, and - having apparently had success in fixing the ‘Oops’ error - tried to tackle the new problem whereby sometimes GTDInbox simply turned its back and steadfastly refused to load

Download it from http://gtdinbox.com/gtdinbox_2-0-4.xpi
As ever, discussion is more than welcome over at the forum!

Just a quick update, this fixes a conflict with the Sxipper extension, and tries again to fix the Oops error for those users who are still suffering with it. Download it from http://gtdinbox.com/gtdinbox_2-0-3.xpi

As ever, discussion is more than welcome over at the forum!

Over the coming week I will be principally addressing the core of GTDInbox. For some highly complex reason (complex in the sense it’s not easily repeatable), GTDInbox sometimes causes the ‘Oops..’ error in Gmail. Actually I cannot even prove this, it may not be GTDInbox, but in the name of getting things done I will still analyse it fully!

This will be followed by looking into the most obvious usability improvements. This means a better dashboard, more feedback on what you’re seeing and less space usage - all with the intent of making it faster & easier to interact with.

I’ve asked a friend within the Gmail team about the timeline for a better Gmonkey API. If such an API can be provided, it means GTDInbox will be more stable, more maintainable, and thus can be more confident in building exciting new features. Fingers crossed for good news there.

The Pro account for donators is currently in active development, and I’m hoping to see something tangible for that soon.

And the future… well the future is really based on really thinking out the modern problems and solutions to the email inbox. Email isn’t going away anytime soon, and so we really should be focusing on taking brave steps to fix it; not simply replace it. GTDInbox should be a pioneer in improving our inboxes.

All ideas for future development should ideally go into the forum (blog comments are not the best place - they get forgotten!), specifically the Feature Requests board. Obviously I only have my own personal experiences on email (see Fixing Email), so all our contributions are very welcome in the ongoing discussion.

Ok, I hold my hands up, the handful of kindly beta testers with system glitches scaled rather badly into more than a handful of angry users! It’s largely thanks to Jack (jpnelson40 on the forum) that I figured out a potential cause of the problems. You’ll notice I said potential there… I still cannot replicate the actual issue myself, but I have a hunch that a change I made prior to 2.0.1 - ironically to increase robustness ahead of the public release - could well have made it less stable. I’m feeling rather foolish right now

So to make ammends, I’ve got a (fairly extensive) patch release here, and I hope it does the job.
Broadly speaking, it is attempting to fix the ‘Oops… system encountered an error’ problem, muting unwanted beta debugging messages, and disabling Korean language support which must have been irritating the living daylights out of our Korean friends

Download it from http://gtdinbox.com/gtdinbox_2-0-2.xpi, discuss it over in the forum, or email me!

(By the way, I’m up against the clock to get this out - there are more updates to come soon - but right now I wanted to address the show stopping issues. If you don’t have any issues, you might want to wait until you upgrade).

Hi all,

Just so you know I’m taking a little holiday over the next week (snowboarding in France to be precise!), and so when I don’t reply to emails/the forum you know why

I’m sure Paul Thomspon (aka Captbunzo) and other forum regulars will be on hand to keep the chatter alive.

When I return, there are several things in the works (over March & April), these include,
* GTDInbox 2’s Official Release (and the beginning of 2.1!)
* MeeTimer’s brand new direction as a tool to actively ‘control’ (not necessarily stop - nothing is forced…) procrastination (should be very cool)
* A super secret project that’s been underway since before Christmas, but got held back due to GTDInbox taking so much longer than planned

See you in a week,
Andy