I’ve just released a little update with some simple (but actually very effective!) usability improvements.
The top Review Bar is optional
We’ve been cultivating lots of tweaks to the sidebar recently, and we’ve finally succeeded at making it good enough that the top bar isn’t strictly needed.
So, if you want to conserve vertical space, or you simply don’t find your eyes often look up there to navigate, we suggest you turn it off in the Preferences (uncheck ‘Enable the Review Bar at the top of Gmail’), and click the cube icon at the bottom of the left-hand sidebar to invoke it.
Oh, and mentioning the Preferences…
The Preferences dialog has been remade
The ugliness of the Preferences has been a thorn in my side for months: it was one of those things I really disliked, but wasn’t quite as important as all the other improvements that were needed.
Now however, I’m pleased to say I’ve finally been able to clean it up, so I removed a lot of unnecessary options, and made navigation a lot more simple.
There can only be one! (Menu, that is)
Another source of discomfort was the fact we had many menus when one would have been a lot better. So now we have one 🙂 And doesn’t it look elegant? I’m rather taken with it.
I fixed the ‘Open in Active Results instead of Gmail’ bug
I owe everyone who mentioned this a gigantic apology, because I’d totally misunderstood what you were reporting, and hence it took a week to fix.
If you hadn’t noticed (and regretfully I hadn’t, because I live in ActiveInbox’s Sidebar these days), when you clicked a label in Gmail’s regular sidebar, it was always opening our Active Results… even for labels that had nothing to do with ActiveInbox.
But happily, it’s a lot less uppity now, and back to being your dutiful servant.
This was written by Andy Mitchell