ProductiveFirefox

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

Okay, this isn’t a final release yet and not really ready for public consumption - there are still plenty of loose ends. But, if you want to invite any friends to use it it is now pretty stable!

GTDInbox RC9 (1.99)
This should be much more stable. It has a ton of bug fixes, and has added better handling of Action reviews (it excludes S/Finished), and a prettier Labels box (thanks to Paul Thompson, aka Captbunzo, who I hope will imminently be becoming significantly more involved).
You can download the new release at http://gtdinbox.com/changelog.htm

GTDInbox 2.0 Website - http://gtdinbox.com
The new website is up, mainly to provide lots of support text. I’m pretty sure it’ll need some smoothing over yet; but I wanted to let it breathe before we go public.

As ever, you’re more than welcome to join in at the forum, http://forum.productivefirefox.com

RC7 is out! Get it at http://gtdinbox.com/changelog.htm

Update 10/02/2008
My apologies, that last release had a very trivial glitch (it kept showing the Welcome Screen everytime Gmail was loaded because it was in debug mode). You can download 1.983 at the changelog above.

You’ll notice I craftily avoided the incremental numbers problem there That doesn’t mean 18 more releases before 2.0 (I hope!); but it does take some pressure off.

Ok, this is the release 1.98 shoudl have been - i.e. much tidied up.

Please let me know of any bugs you find - or any polish you think it needs - over at the forum, http://forum.productivefirefox.com

And download from, http://gtdinbox.com/changelog.htm

Update 2/2/08
As Todd discovered, you may need to refresh (F5) the changelog page to see the latest release!

At some point last week, there was a Gmail update that was more fundamental than normal, and broke GTDInbox. In retrospect, the fix was pretty small; but it was tricky! I’m hoping - given the nature of this change - that it is a rare occurence. Most Gmail alterations can be very easily dealt with in GTDInbox, so long-term the stability of GTDInbox isn’t at risk.

As a consequence of the Gmail change completely stopping GTDInbox from working, I’ve had to release 1.98 sooner than I would have liked. I wanted to add some more tweaks (like better legibility in certain parts, as requested by Ed Pontius); and I also fear there may still be a few glitches… but I thought on balance it was better to have something that worked rather than nothing at all!

Of course, this does mean I have just one more RC left (1.99) before I run out of digits for testing the real GTDInbox 2 release

Download GTDInbox 2 RC5 (v1.98)

I’m going to start this with an apology, for the momentum on the blog fell away over the last few weeks. The reason is fairly straightforward, a small community of testers on the forum sprung up and have been key to getting GTDInbox through the very rough & ready development period. There are a lot of subscribers on the blog, so I hope you’ll forgive the cowardise, but I was somewhat terrified of several hundred people using the very unstable code

Now for the good news, GTDInbox 2.0 is very close to public release! This means you should be able to use it and only suffer the occassional error.

A little request, I’d like to keep this ‘off the record’ for a little while longer. By all means tell some friends, but I’d rather it wasn’t blogged about until the 2.0 release.

Okay, there’s no new website yet, so you kind of have to figure things as you go. Essentially, you will either see the UI elements, or you can right click things (or in some cases, shift+click things) to get the rest.

You can download it from, http://gtdinbox.com/changelog.htm
There is a first draft of Getting Started at http://gtdinbox.com/support-gettingstarted.htm
And of course, you can discuss it in the Forum, at http://forum.productivefirefox.com

Actually that should be a ‘yay, gmail gets coloured labels’, because it’s a planned feature I no longer have to code; but of course, a new Gmail feature means a modified Gmail, which once more broke GTDInbox. (In fact, coming home to GTDInbox tonight was not unlike assessing the collateral damage after a bomb…).

But there is a bigger problem for us here - the Gmail engineers have pledged to update Gmail much more often; which greatly increases the chance of GTDInbox being broken. They have been kind enough to include a light-weight way for developers like me to (safely) work with Gmail’s internals; but it’s currently very limited, and so is not the solution (yet). Hopefully in the future this will help stablise GTDInbox.

Happily though, following tonight’s events I’ve quickly crafted a “rapid-response” solution to automatically repair GTDInbox when Gmail updates. Hopefully this means you’ll never have to witness the emotional rollercoaster that is finding GTDInbox broken (at least not again ). Famous last words & all that…

With GTDInboxV2, I’ve been focusing a lot more on moving beyond crudely offering GTD labels (as in v1).
I’ve been trying to work out the most elegant solution for turning Gmail into an efficient task manager and knowledge store.
But, it’s becoming apparent to do this I need some more use-cases. I’d love to know how people interact with Gmail (using GTD) right now. (more…)

Continuing the preview-while-we-wait theme; I wanted to highlight another little treat in GTDInbox v2 that I’m particularly fond of

I think this is easiest to reveal with an example, so here goes…
When I receive an email, I rack my brains to try & remember if that person has written before… it’s hit & miss at best. Therefore I made GTDInbox capable of, after the conversation is loaded, right clicking their name, choose “Show All Conversations”, and have all existing conversations with them popup in a new window (without moving me away from the conversation).

Similarly, if I’m reading a conversation, and I notice something I want to research deeper in the text, I can do a Gmail search, but have the results shown in a new window - again so I do not have to leave the conversation.

Conceptually, it’s letting you do useful research without disrupting your normal work flow.

Actually, as I’m writing this I’ve just had another thought… say I receive an email from ‘Bob’ that is labelled ‘P/BuildHouse’. It would be neat to be able to quickly see all other conversations I’ve had with Bob about the BuildHouse project. Hmmm….

I was a little late twigging the implications of Gmail’s recently announced IMAP support, but it really is brilliant for GTD-ers.

What is IMAP for Gmail?
In a nutshell, it takes messages you’ve labelled, and allows you to use them in other (email) clients; with labels mapping to folders.

So, P/GTDInbox will map to the folder GTDInbox, which would be a sub folder of P.
And, S/Next Action will map to folder Next Action, which would be a sub folder of S.

Any changes you make, by moving messages between folders, are then perfectly synchronised next time you log into Gmail.

Why is this Great?
First & foremost, it allows you to retrieve/manipulate your tasks using your favourite email client (e.g. Thunderbird); allowing you to take advantage of GTD email features with your regular desktop software.
This is particularly useful when the email client is on a mobile device, like the iPhone, allowing you to access your tasks on the road.

It also allows developers to create specialised (possibly GTD based) software that uses the messages/tasks you have in Gmail as the database. So, in the future you may do 90% of your (email related) task management within Gmail, but use 3rd party tools to either work with it on other devices (e.g. PDA), or to use specialist functionality.

In short, IMAP - while not an instantly beneficial feature - makes GTDInbox & Gmail much more capable as a ‘base’ system that other software can hook into & extend… meaning more efficient/available task management!