New Sidebar Priorities and Groupable Actions
The big lesson from you all during 4.0.0.3 was that the new sidebar categories (Today, To Do, Overdue and Low Priority) were pretty dire. Oh, and that you hated not being able to pin your own items 🙂 I was duly humbled!
In response, and to get myself back into your good books (I hope!), I’ve simplified it down to just two things: Top Priority (Today, Overdue, Next/Starred) and To Do (Action, Some Day, Waiting On)… and those items are pinnable 🙂
That, I hope, takes care of the sidebar…
… which brings us to the ‘Active Results’ tab. 4.0.0.3 was a really early build, but it definitely did not *feel* right. The tabs weren’t quite making sense. But I felt there was something there, so I’ve pushed on with it, refining it to see if we make this work.
So, whatever you click on the sidebar open the appropriate search results, but skips straight to the ‘Active Results’ tab.
This gives you the results, separated by their status/deadline, and now (I love this bit!), groupable by Project, Deadline and Contact!
For example, you might have Overdue items split into their individual days, and you might have your ‘Action’ items shown under their associated Projects.
Prettifying the Overbearing “Mega Queries”
One big behind-the-scenes bits I’ve taken care of is ActiveInbox’s super queries (e.g. for ‘Overdue’ – which is a huge collection of deadline labels, clogging up your screen). Now, those queries are effortlessly changed into “Deadline:Overdue”, “Top-Priority”, “Project:Issues”, etc.
Making the HAB a little more functional
I cleaned up a few bugs David and others were requesting:
The Finish button now removes deadlines (and is the first choice if a conversation is archived, but has a deadline).
The calendar italicizes the current day.
There is a preference that makes ActiveInbox remove all status labels if you select a deadline; and vice versa. So, you can’t have S/Action and ‘Today’. This is in the preference cog on the HAB.
What’s Next?
It would be great if you could help me prioritize 🙂
So, we have the choice of:
- Notes on conversations
- Continued improvements to Active Results
Tidy up the visuals to be more useable (the alpha is ugly!)
Add an ‘Horizontal Action Bar’ to the results, to change labels
Add a count to the ‘Active Results’ tab to make it clear something needs your attention
Make it work with general searches (Active Results will fail for a search on ‘blah’ for example)
As ever – hit me with all your feedback on 4.0.0.4, good, bad and aggressive 😉
In particular, are we on the right track with Active Results. Shall we keep evolving it?
How To Download ActiveInbox 4 Alpha 4
Please note, this is very important:
- It is only for Plus users. If you don’t have Plus, and you upgrade, you will not be able to use ActiveInbox 4 Alpha (and will have to uninstall & downgrade).
- It is only for Google Chrome (for now!)
- Click Install ActiveInbox 4.0 Alpha 4 for Chrome and install as usual
- Close the Gmail tab and open a new tab, and load Gmail in it (otherwise you will get visual glitches)
This was written by Andy Mitchell