ProductiveFirefox

Thank you to everyone who has commented on the last two posts with feedback on their problems - it was a really great response that has helped identify a few more bugs (whether we’ve really got it right remains to be seen with this release!).

Particular mention goes to Leo Soto who was the first to identify one of the major bugs, and then managed to dig into the code to find a solution.

I also have another reason to be quietly optimistic about this release - Stephen has just finished his major update to the loading framework. As the errors you reported were during the loading process, I am hopeful that his improvements will have fixed them.

So let’s find out shall we?

Get over to http://www.gtdinbox.com/3/ now to install GTDInbox 3.0 Alpha 6

(As ever, please continue to report below problems - or successes! - as you see them).

Update: Realised shortly after pushing Alpha 5 that I’d left in a very embarrassing glitch! Just updated it, and it’s now available on the website.

For some people GTDInbox is refusing to load, but frustratingly, it’s working here.

The good news is, the 3.0 Alpha’s all spit out debugging information, so we may be able to catch the problem.

If you are running GTDInbox 3.0 Alpha 4 and it will not load, you can help! It’s quite easy I promise

1) Close Gmail tabs

2) Open Firefox’s Error Console (in the Tools menu)

3) In the Error Console, move to the ‘Messages’ tab/button

4) Click Clear to clear the Messages list

5) Go back to the Firefox window, and open Gmail (and log in)

6) Switch back to the Messages list in Error Console. You should start seeing debugging information from GTDInbox.

In normal circumstances, there will be quite a lot. Fortunately, there is only one type of thing you need to look for (and if it’s crashing, there will be much less debugging output as it will stop after the error).

An error will be on multiple lines (one of the only messages that is), and it will have line numbers and stack trace information. This should make it easy to spot in a quick scan.

An example (sent by Leo before), is:

Error in glNavBar: Could not find mainBucketsContainer nodeStack trace:Exception thrown(”Could not find mainBucketsContainer node”,”glNavBar”)@chrome://gtdinbox/content/js/util/debug.js:110([object Object])@chrome://gtdinbox/content/js/gmail/ui/glNavBar.js:73

If you can see anything like this in the Messages list, please add it to the comments.  Once we can diagnose the problem it should be quick to fix.

GTDInbox 3.0 Alpha 4 is available at http://www.gtdinbox.com/3/

It is mostly performance and robustness improvements, but does include a visual modification to Archive/Move-Next; and how it scrolls through emails in your Inbox and other views. The other major area we tackled was getting it to load at all - quite a few users were simply not seeing anything. I believe this is to do with other extensions in Firefox (it’s not their fault though - just a clash), and I hope we’ve now fixed it. (Please reply here if we haven’t!).

We’re going to get back to a cycle of rapid releases. There was a big gap between Alpha 3 and Alpha 4. There were several reasons for this - mostly to do with ambition and hard-to-find technical problems. To stop it happening again we’re implementing a rule that nothing new gets built until existing bugs are solved.

For the next release (probably Alpha 5), Stephen has been working on a new and improved framework for loading GTDInbox and handling future plugins. Meanwhile Pete & I have been designing visual and usability advances that are now ready to implement. If that all goes well, we’ll be into the Beta releases!

Grab GTDInbox 3.0 Alpha 3 by clicking the link. If prompted, tell it to open with Firefox. If you have any trouble, download it to your computer first, and use Firefox to click ‘File’ then ‘Open File’ and select the XPI you downloaded.

We’ve focused on stability here, so no UI changes; but it should be much more reliable (I realise I’m asking for trouble saying that!).

In addition to the stability, I concentrated on a key area of the Gmail API (local email management) that will pave the way for faster and more robust future features.

And speaking of those new features… that is the next phase. Next week we’ll be tweaking the UI and finally adding in Preferences (they’ve been a real pain so far).

We’ve got a really clear idea of the overall look & feel we’re now going for - a true ‘task manager’ within Gmail, and as streamlined as possible for handling incoming emails. I’m really looking forward to the next few weeks.

Keep up with little updates on GTDInbox’s Twitter page, and use the blog here for feedback.

Known Issues (as we couldn’t tackle some higher level stuff):
* If a new message arrives, it confuses the Preview popup
* There are some circumstances (like after clicking Archive to move next) where the Labelling Box doesn’t show in a Conversation

PS It’s a Bank Holiday here in the UK (as other places I expect), so I won’t be able to reply to any emails until Tuesday.

Although it’s currently lower priority that GTDInbox itself, I must confess I’m really digging the new website. It’s got a few rough edges and no images, but you can take a little peek at http://www.gtdinbox.com/3/

Would love to hear what you think, and any ideas to better explain what we’re doing.

The 2nd alpha doesn’t appear very significant, so you’ll just have to trust me there are big changes underneath! Those changes are mostly preparing to add the Preferences back in, and that they’re capable of supporting our upcoming mini-plugin system (experimental features galore!). They’re also going to link to our imminent and free ‘GTDInbox Account’ that will let you share Preferences (and other useful data) between machines. But all that’s in the future…

Right now, I’ve attempted to target some of the worst bugs, like not loading or causing Compose/Reply to hang. I’m not 100% of my success with that yet; but critical bugs are obviously top priority in the alpha stage.

I hope - although I can’t say for certain after the setbacks over the last few days - that we might be able to sneek another alpha release out tomorrow (Thursday), but if not there will definitely be one by the weekend. I’ll be able to start focusing on front-end bugs/fixes from tomorrow, so improvements should become more obvious.

Download the new alpha at http://www.gtdinbox.com/gtdinbox_3-0a2.xpi (it opens with Firefox - you may need to download it to your machine first).

I was impressed when quite a few people found our Twitter account through their own detective work… this is the first time we’ve actually linked to it! The reason for going public is that we - that’s Pete and I right now - have started using it for smaller bits of news about our progress.

Please come and follow our updates at http://www.twitter.com/gtdinbox

Just a little update on progress… I’m working on fixing the updates to problems everyone reported on the first alpha. It seems that for some people it will not load, and for others it causes it to hang when they Compose/Reply. Attempting fixes on both but I’m not yet 100% sure what causes them.

I should have another alpha release ready tomorrow (Tuesday). It’s taking a bit longer than planned because I tried to squeeze in Settings; and it’s a lot more complex than I anticipated! But for a good reason - it’s a key part of our new ‘expandable’ platform that should - in good time - see experimental new GTDInbox functionality introduced faster, and possibly even from 3rd parties.

It is a little behind schedule, it is far from finished, and it may do less than earlier versions of GTDInbox did… but no one can now deny it is here!

Most importantly of all, I hope donators feel exceptionally proud - you are directly responsible for the new found momentum GTDInbox has. I hope I said thank you to every one of you personally, but I’ll never hesitate to say it again - thank you all.

The new website will go up either later on tonight or tomorrow, but it doesn’t yet have any help documentation anyway - so you are not missing anything.

As such, this release is only for people experienced with GTDInbox. There are no options to customise, no install routines to set labels up, and no help guides.

It’s also important to note that none of your settings will be carried over, but there are virtually no settings anyway. (I will try and set up the Options interface as soon as possible).

What we do have is a brand new backend that is more robust, and a brand new UI that has stripped all non-essential features and focused on making the remaining core features work as well as possible.

Over the next few weeks you will see rapid releases as we fix the bugs you find (please email me for now - andy@gtdinbox.com - the forum is no longer the best place to report bugs); and build in the features we want for launch (there’s really just a handful of filter functions and a lot more polishing remaining). So stay peeled on this blog.

Please download it from,
http://www.gtdinbox.com/gtdinbox_3-0a1.xpi
(You should be able to open this link with Firefox and it will automatically install; otherwise download it to your computer, then in Firefox click ‘File’ -> ‘Open File’ and select it from the location you downloaded to. In both cases you will need to restart Firefox).

Just a quick update while we’re waiting for 3.0a1… both the public release and the 2.1 alpha release have been updated to fix some recent glitches. To update go to the GTDInbox website and click Install.