I apologise for the recent spam, it seems all SMF boards (of which ours is one), have been attacked since Nov 10th onwards.

I’ve increased the security against the spammers, and I hope it’s now under control.

After spending about 2 hours trying to manually delete the spam, I realised I was no where near the end (200 spammers, 60 new topics and 180 new messages); so I took the phillistine approach and just deleted everything in the database after a certain date - including new users.

If you’re account or message has been deleted, I’m sorry - please join or repost.

Here’s to a return to sanity on the forum!

Andy

Thanks go out to Matt Buchanan, Nathan Sudds, Andre Branco, Jim Passmore, Simon Stacpoole, and of course, Paul Thompson.

Until I push it to Mozilla, you can download it as an experimental release from http://www.gtdinbox.com

(Email me if there are any probs!)

PS Jim alerted me to the mess in the forum, I’ll get ‘em kicked out.

This is a pretty major update… but it’s not that easy to tell!

It’s basically running on the brand new GTDInbox 2.1 engine (the final iteration); but with none of the new features. I thought it worthy of a release, because while 2.1 is about to enter beta, the mainstream users will want more speed and stability now.

So, lots of useless code has been removed. Infact 100kb of the downloadable size (and about 300kb internally) - which means GTDInbox’s load times are faster (which in turn means Firefox and Gmail load faster). A lot of major routines have been completely rewritten, yielding about a 50% increase in speed and the same again for memory-usage reduction. You should also notice the Preview box (and the label select box in the Conversation view) load much faster. Finally, all bugs I could find have been fixed, and it is even more friendly toward Gmail’s servers.

So, all round a pretty invisible improvement; but a big improvement nonetheless! Your computer, Firefox and general productivity will be thankful

Let me know if you face any issues with the upgrade.

PS A few bits have been tweaked. The Preview icon double-click shortcuts have changed; the Related functionality when you right-click a label/contact has been dropped. Both weren’t working right before, so I hope no one will mind the inconvenience. They’re both due to return in far superior forms in the imminent 2.1 beta.

Why am I mentioning this? Other than a little promo, I know a lot of GTDInbox users normally have great feedback, and as this is very early days all feedback is welcome. You can send an email to hello@locallycompared.com - it will be appreciated!

* The search box and search-filters now work again.
* Thanks to Andre Branco, the Labels box is now showing the right count for  Status labels (the number in the square brackets []).
* It’s behaving itself better when applying S/Next Action via the More Actions menu.
* It now will load with Firefox 3.1 (but not thoroughly tested!)

Get it over at http://www.gtdinbox.com/#install

Can you give it a whirl and email me directly if you find any problems. If everything goes well here, I’ll upload it to Mozilla on Monday.

To install it, just go to http://gtdinbox.com/ and choose “Install GTDInbox 2.0.10 RC”

I’m going to take tomorrow to do some work on 2.1 … I’ll keep you posted on how that goes. There is a very clear plan in place now for what shape it will take (so far GTDInbox’s growth has been very organic - often rewriting the same bit of functionality as improved ways of working are found).

Oh, and did you know it’s over 2 years since the very first - very primitive - GTDInbox was released?! We’ve come a very long way since that first effort, when I had no idea if there was even an appetite for a simple customer-service app built over Gmail. Of course lots and lots of you have subsequently decided there was, and we’re now pushing things into very cool and definitely unchartered territories, in the name of ‘taming the inbox’. Thanks everyone and here’s to a bright future!

I’m actually leaving for a short break (Spain!) in an hour, but I wanted to share this before I went. It’s only a beta, and there’s lots of new stuff, so use it at your peril, but so far it’s been okay for me.

Code Refactor
I tidied up some of the label add/removing code, which you make adding/removing labels both faster and more consistent (as well as more maintainable in the future) when you right click an email in the ThreadList (e.g. Inbox). The real aim here was to make it that little bit easier to add Statuses and other labels to your messages before archiving them (Did you know you can double click a label in that Preview box to apply the label and archive the message? Useful for applying Statuses and archiving much faster).

More Actions Menu
Has some new tricks! You can now Remove All Labels from selected threads, or in a conversation, you can “Delete and Move Next”.

Multiple Label Categories
You are no longer contrained to just Statuses/Projects/etc.! Using the settings, you can now add your own label types (e.g. “Focus” with the prefix F/).

Options has Moved Home
GTDInbox Options are now part of Gmail Settings, as a new tab. That has made it much easier to find, use and extend.

Search Filter Box
Next to Gmail’s Search Box there is now a (fully customisable - see Settings) filter box. For example, you can choose to apply your search text just to Files, or People, or within the Last Week, or just to Actions, or maybe just within Sent Items.

Label Box Action Count
I haven’t got a good name for this, but it is definitely the best new feature! Often asked for in the forums, I was always concerned it would either confuse people or be too slow. I found a way to do it quickly, and I’m happy to say I was wrong, not only if it very intuitive, it makes the world of difference to task-management. You can now see - by glancing at the Labels box - has many actions you have outstanding (for each Status), or how many Projects/Contexts have outstanding actions; just as before it showed you unread emails. (For the record, in the case of a Project, e.g. P/GTDInbox, it will show you #actions+#unread. So, if it had 3 unread, and 2 statuses applied; it would show you P/GTDInbox [5]).

You may be wondering what the status is on 2.1 and the Pro account…
The Pro account is about 80% complete. We need to buy a new server, move the system over to it, and hook it into GTDInbox. The Pro developer is currently focused elsewhere, but he should be able to help us again in about a month. I’m sorry this has dragged out, I really want to start using it myself; but in the meantime GTDInbox development is bounding forward!

2.1 is underway - I’d estimate about 70% implemented. To be honest, lots of bits and pieces that were going to be unveiled as 2.1 are sneaking into the 2.0.9/2.0.10 builds, they’re just too tempting; but there is more cool stuff in the wings. It is really focused on closing loops and managing all active ‘things’ in your inbox. So, it goes a long way to help you decide what to pay attention to, and when you attempt to close one loop, to ensure it really is closed. It adds quite a bit to the UI, so I’d love pay bring in our old designer again to make it appealing and useable. If you’d like to take part in making that happen, donations are really appreciated right now - just scoot over to the Donations page (if you like the way GTDInbox is going of course!).

And finally, you can download GTDInbox 2.0.10b1, by going to http://gtdinbox.com/#install and clicking ‘Install 2.0.10 Beta 1′.

Download it from http://gtdinbox.com/gtdinbox_2-0-9-3b2.xpi
(Apologies I haven’t automated this part of the update just yet, Máté Rémiás has suggested it and I agree it would be handy for beta releases).

I sneaked a few things I was going to put into 2.0.9.4 into this release, including:

1) Fixed Bug: When load Options, the screen greys out
2) Fixed Bug: When click Finished for many items on ‘More Actions’ it fails to archive them.
3) Add Unread email as an inbuilt Modify Reviews
4) Make Statuses & Recent Projects switchable between inline/drop-down menus (see UI options)
5) Hide labels dropdown after clicking to add/remove a label (rather than staying open) (see UI options)
6) Fixed Bug: Make sure Label’s colour boxes stay in place even with long, nested label names

More to come soon!

Thanks to Jim Passmore for keeping an eye on ongoing bugs, and Nathan Sudds for a few recent pointers!

Things fixed in 2.0.9.3:
1) Make sure it installs ok (was grey-screening it)
2) Make Options work properly (again, grey-screening it)
3) Question whether to install Status labels on new accounts (some accounts don’t want to be GTD!)
4) Make sure Finish works when you double click
5) STOP “GTDINBOX FAILED TO LOAD” (capitals here because it was such a pain, and I think it’s under control… touch wood)
6) Make sure Reply to Self always shows who it is sending the message too (just in case it develops a bug)
7) Ensure the ‘More Actions’ menu works even when invoked with a keyboard shortcut (.)
8 ) Make the colour box on the Labels always show (may still fail if label nesting too deep)

I tried to look into some problems reported on the forum, but could not replicate them. Any ideas are welcome.
* Hipster Print has weird results with Context or multiple accounts (worked fine in every condition for me).

Ok, coming in 2.0.9.4 (due within 2 weeks):
1) Add Unread email as an inbuilt Modify Reviews
2) Make Statuses & Recent Projects dropdown/inline an Option (like the other types of label)
3) Add ‘Remove All Labels’ to the More Actions drop down and the popup
4) Option to disable Labels box modification (if want to use Folders4Gmail)
5) Option to hide labels dropdown after adding/removing a label (rather than staying open)
6) Correct Status counts in Labels box
7) Make sure colour boxes stay in place even with nested labels
8 ) Add new Label types (more like ‘Statuses’ ‘Contexts’ etc.)
9) Do more to backup/share Modify Reviews
10) In More Actions, add the ability to Delete and Move Next

You can download direct from http://gtdinbox.com/gtdinbox_2-0-9-3b1.xpi

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