Introducing Notes

Okay, this is the big one! We can now add our own notes to each and every single conversation in Gmail. What does that mean? You can store next actions, links to calendar events, links to related emails or private notes that will help drive the conversation towards your goal.

It’s as simple as either clicking the edit icon, or double clicking the text box (both to the right of the ‘Notes’ label) to enter your note.

And, when you view the ‘Active Results’ for any search, the first line of the notes are shown! This makes it very useful if you develop the habit of using the first line of your note to show next actions (think of it as a better subject line).

One draw back: the note is stored on our servers, and you cannot yet access the note when you’re not using ActiveInbox. We’re thinking about ways of doing this… either by having a separate web interface (so you can access it anywhere), or possibly by storing the note as an email in the conversation.

The Projects View

You no longer need to just rely on a view of ‘Top Priority’ or ‘To Do’ to drive your reviews.

You can now click ‘Projects’ in the sidebar to get a list of all projects in use, and instantly see active conversations within each.

Firefox Support

We finally did it! All future releases of ActiveInbox 4 will work on Firefox as well as Chrome.

Tidier ‘About’ Box

To bring ActiveInbox 4 back up to speed with a little improvement we made to V3, the ‘About’ box is hugely simplified & a lot sleeker: it’s now just News, Support, Account & Preferences.

Warning! It Is Not Very Pretty 🙂

One significant caveat is that Alpha 5 isn’t very pretty. I have focused on trying out new features with the hopes of getting your very early feedback. If we get the greenlight, Pete will start making it beautiful 🙂

Bits and Pieces

I tried to fix as many bugs you found as possible:

  • Thank you once again to the hugely helpful & much appreciated Daniel Griffiths for helping me fix a bug where the prefs dropdown appeared off the screen.
  • Annoying tooltips have been removed from the sidebar
  • On a Monday, clicking ‘Start of Next Week’ will actually be next week now 🙂

What’s Next?

Unless there are any urgent demands:

  1. Alpha 6 will include working ‘Older’/’Newer’ links in conversations linked to from ‘To Do’ and ‘Projects’; as well as the HAB in the ‘To Do’ view so you can change the status of emails using checkboxes.
  2. Alpha 7 will prettify and refine what we have.
  3. Alpha 8 will be dedicated to ‘Focus Mode’ which I hope to discuss very soon 🙂

Install

You can now go to www.activeinboxhq.com/install_v4.html to grab the latest version (although it should auto update if you were already using a V4 alpha).

  

This was written by Andy Mitchell