It would be wrong to start this post without a brief bout of personal recrimination – this release is hugely overdue, blowing our weekly releases out of the water. It started simply enough, but this snowballed into a complete rewrite of our Popup (which itself represents a major part of GTDInbox) and, well, nearly three weeks later here we are!
So what has the Popup rewrite yielded? For starters, its faster – it should appear quicker, change tabs more seamlessly and scroll more smoothly. There is now ‘Group By’ buttons to group threads by Project, Context, Contact and List. And perhaps most importantly of all (not to mention one of the most requested features), you can now resize the Popup. It sounds minor, but so far it’s had a big impact on usability. (Less interestingly, the whole thing is now much more expandable for the future).
The Sidebar box has changed too. It’s a lot tidier, thanks to Pete’s handy work, the Statuses have been replaced with ‘Views’ (e.g. Tasks To Do, Waiting On, Some Day), and Label Categories have a better visual indication of what needs your attention. Following the discussion in the last blog post (http://blog.gtdinbox.com/2009/08/07/design-discussion-labels-on-sidebar/), it’s also more stable – it needs a click to appear, and it stays there until you click it off.
Finally – and this is just a little nod to a big irritation of mine – the new Gmail ‘Recent Labels’ (the one that pushes everything in the sidebar down), can now be hidden; to save lots of space.
As this is a big change, I’m playing it a little cautious – it will be on the blog for a day or two before I push it to Mozilla. We’re also about ready to enter Beta status – if this release goes okay, we’ll move up to the next level.
http://www.gtdinbox.com/gettingstarted.htm
** Update Thur 27th August **
Okay, it would appear that there are problems for lots of you 🙁 As far as I can work out, the major ones appear to be interference with/from Java QuickStarter (jqs@sun.com), a failure to load until you change view (e.g. click a label), and the X selecting everything… plus some smaller usability issues (which should be a quick fix).
If anyone can help – either by screenshare, or just talking me through what they’re seeing, please drop me an email (andy@gtdinbox.com) and let’s get this fixed.
This was written by Andy Mitchell