function installXPI(href){
if (typeof(InstallTrigger) != ‘undefined’){
var xpi = {‘ActiveInbox’: href};
InstallTrigger.install(xpi);
}else{
alert(“You must be using Firefox to install ActiveInbox.”);
}
}

Happy New Year, followers of the Gregorian calendar, and a friendly wave to everyone else!

We fell into a rather long development cycle in December as we had to undergo a few complex bits & bobs. For this reason, I’m not going to push this release live to everyone, but instead offer it cautiously to power users on the blog. Softly softly…

HAB Where You Want It

The Horizontal Action Bar is now a permanent fixture on Gmail’s header, after much heckling from the stalls, and possibly a few hurled tomatoes.

It means that wherever you scroll on the conversation, the status buttons, deadlines, projects and move-nexters are instantly accessible.

Cleaner Deadline Labels

We had a big discussion about this a few months ago, and it’s finally gone into production.

Essentially, we’ve dropped the 43 folders paradigm (of 12 month labels and 31 day labels, e.g. D/D/6 D/M/1 for today) in favour of a single label in the format ZD/yyyymmdd (e.g. ZD/20120106).

The main reason for this is mobile use. Regular mail clients cannot handle multiple label searches (i.e. the day and the month), so there was no way to review a deadline on the go. Now you can just scan through all known deadline folders.

It’s also visually cleaner, and less likely to go wrong (before it might break if you had the day label but not the month label).

And of course, it can finally consider years.

If you’re wondering, it will clean up after itself: if there are no longer any conversations that have a given deadline label (because they’ve all been completed), ActiveInbox will remove that deadline label from Gmail.

When you load the new version of ActiveInbox, there is a big button on the HAB to migrate your deadlines. Let it run, refresh Gmail, and everything will be ready to go!

And more…

Pete prettified a few bits & pieces: the dropdown calendar is a lot more useable and we’ve finally got “real” pin icons (a constant source of confusion!).

The Notes viewer has a new option “Show Notes on Action Bar Only If Note Written”, so you cannot forget a note you’ve written.

You can install it for:
* Chrome, by clicking http://www.activeinboxhq.com/activeinbox_4-0-4-1.crx
* Firefox, by clicking http://www.activeinboxhq.com/activeinbox_4-0-4-1.xpi

  

This was written by Andy Mitchell