Another round of bug fixes, this time addressing some things that have been coming in as error reports (via the Error Monitor) for several weeks, but it was only with the release of 3.0.20.1 that we started receiving enough detail on the problems to solve them. Thanks to everyone who submitted errors.
I suggest you install immediately (although it will also be distributed via Firefox in a few days), http://www.gtdinbox.com/gettingstarted.htm.
After pulling a very late night effort chasing addon conflicts down the rabbit hole, hot on the heels of 3.0.19 comes 3.0.20.
If you’re still having any problems with GTDInbox not loading, it’s most likely a tussle with other addons. This takes us one (big) step closer to making everyone play nicely together.
Thanks to extensive support from Michael Lebor, we tracked down some more loading issues, as well as a some-time conflict with the RememberTheMilk addon.
I also had a little error of judgement in 3.0.18: it was all too keen to give you an irritating alert box if it completely failed to load. That has all been stopped now, and it won’t happen again 
I think we’re getting close to all user’s having a normal experience with GTDInbox. The remaining issues seem to be conflicts with other Firefox addons. If it is still not loading for you, please drop an email to support@gtdinbox.com with the behaviour you are seeing, other addons & Gmail Labs settings you have, and any ideas on the cause (as well as keep submitting errors in GTDInbox when given the opportunity). I’ll then work with you to solve them (we’ll aim to work closely with just one person for each identified problem, so please don’t be hurt if it isn’t you! We will keep going until everyone’s GTDInbox is working great).
As usual, either wait for Firefox to auto update it, or download 3.0.19 from http://www.gtdinbox.com/gettingstarted.htm.
With the help of Uwe Grampe, Loren Silverman, Mike Crowe, Michael Massing, Bruce Stryd, Lance Allen, Susan Penter, Joe Staats and many more, we’ve been able to track down even more errors (so much for thinking 3.0.17 would solve everything! Getting ever closer though). Thanks everyone!
For your delectable pleasure, these include:
* A problem where the conversation labeling buttons would not appear if you used Multiple Inboxes on the right hand side
* Draft conversations generating lots of minor error warnings
* GTDInbox not loading if you have 3rd party cookies disabled in Firefox 3.6
* ‘Recent Labels’ no longer being hidden in the navigation bar because of a Gmail change
* If you expand/collapse labels in the dropdown (in a conversation), it would add/remove the label
* If you create a new label, it would not show it in the normal Gmail ‘Labels’ dropdown until you changed views
Get it now from http://www.gtdinbox.com/gettingstarted.htm, or wait for Firefox to update it automatically.
Ever since our inception, a steady stream of users have enquired about the difference between a Next Action and an Action.
I think it’s finally time to figure this out and find the optimal process.
The Current Workflow
As a quick reminder about where we are right now. There are 5 standard Status labels: Next Action, Action, Waiting On, Some Day and Finished.
The core workflow is, if an email can be done in under 2 minutes, do it and Finish it. If you’re waiting for a response, set it to Waiting On. Otherwise it’s an Action. And, if it’s the highest priority thing in a project, it’s a Next Action.
The Tedious Part of the Workflow
The problem with this is, I don’t care about S/Action. To me, everything that isn’t “Finished” is an action.
The other Statuses are useful modifiers. Next Action is high priority, and Waiting On is delegated/awaiting-response.
But the hassle involved in setting each important email to S/Action is too great to make me do it 100% of the time. I’m lazy and GTDInbox doesn’t support me, and therefore there are now holes in my system (email that isn’t categorized).
A Major Technical Limitation for any New Solution
The rub – the reason we cannot just replace the Action label with something more lightweight (like “-label:s-finished”) – is sadly entirely technical. When people first install GTDInbox, in all likelihood, they have 1000s of emails in their inbox, none of which have the S/Finished label. To be quick, and to know how many emails there are within each Status, GTDInbox downloads all Statuses. Therefore, for new users, if there was no S/Action label, the search for Actions would be “-label:s-finished”; which means GTDInbox would have to download 1000s of emails to maintain its current functionality. That is simply not feasible.
Possible Solutions for a Better Way to Action Emails
One solution is to make S/Action irrelevant (and for Actions to be “-label:S-Finished”) and overcome the technical limitation by creating an Install tool. So when you install GTDInbox for the first time, it would process the inbox and archive all emails, and add S/Finished to them. (Arguably, whatever we do, this would be a useful tool). The weakness with this is that a) it would be slow, b) the user might skip it, and we’d still be left with 1000s of emails to download. I’d have no confidence in this solution.
Another solution is to fully automate the addition of S/Action to all newly arrived emails with a Filter. This achieves the desired result: every new email is an Action until it is Finished. However, it may quickly become unwieldy as all spam, all mailing lists and everything else would be given the S/Action label. The solution here is for the user to tweak the filter to exclude mailing list messages. Perhaps a more serious problem is that the filter will also apply S/Action to all replies. So, if you had changed a conversation to S/Waiting On, and you get a reply, it’s automatically changed to S/Action. Which may be fine for some people, but I believe it’s a problem as I like to manually decide whether I’m no longer Waiting On a response (i.e. the response may be insufficient, or a simple acknowledgement that they will do it in the future). It’s an even bigger problem for S/Next, where a high priority email will be returned to normal priority as soon as a reply comes in. So sadly, we have to rule the Filter option out.
If you’re wondering what would happen if we restructured GTDInbox so that it does not need to download all Actions… well it would result in a serious drop in functionality and efficiency. GTDInbox would no longer know which Projects (and Contexts) have actions. So, you would not be able to scan your Project labels to see which ones need your attention.
As the root of the problem is the hassle involved with adding the S/Action label, we could semi-automate this. For instance, as soon as you view a conversation (which you would not do for an uninteresting mailing list item), it is automatically given the S/Action label. (This would be a preference). Using the “Send And” button of Plus, your newly Actioned email could be Finished as soon as you reply. My only concern here is that you might feel that GTDInbox is oppressing you – a Pavlovian response that makes you fear opening an email because it’ll become an Action – a burden! I hope this wouldn’t be such a big problem with a prominent “Finished” button. We could also make it so that when you remove the S/Action label (in the Gmail conversation header) GTDInbox automatically adds the Finished label — another way to complete a conversation. (We could even revisit the Filter idea, by watching emails that arrive in the inbox ourselves, and adding an S/Action immediately if it has no other Status – but this takes us back to automatically Actioning mailing list items and other unimportant email, so it’s not desirable). Another (more manual) alternative is a new button that would “Action, Archive and Move Next” – although this isn’t watertight so we’d still be prone to forget.
Summary – and your thoughts?
I believe I’ve covered (perhaps a little too exhaustively 
) all the possible solutions. To me, some solution built around the last option (i.e. automate adding S/Action) is the most desirable.
If you’ve managed to stick this blog post through the end, then, well, congratulations Your thoughts about the most how best to Action emails (and your own workflow) would be most welcome in the comments.
If you use Prism and you want to run GTDInbox for Gmail on it, please drop an email to Mike Crowe at support.prism@gtdinbox.com.
He’s working to get regular ports of GTDInbox to Prism released, and is looking for some beta testers to get started. Do let him know if you’re interested!
Get GTDInbox 3.0.17 now (It will appear automatically in Firefox in the next few days).
This is one of the biggest bug fixing updates we’ve ever done, and includes several big steps behind the scenes towards the Chrome port.
One of the major problems – it turns out after lots of digging – is that GTDInbox would not work when cookies are (partially) disabled in Firefox’s preferences. A huge thank you to Tom Brown for so diligently trying fixes and sending feedback to help solve this last week.
There’s lots more bug fixing besides. Most notably for Plus users, “Reply to Self” should now always appear (on conversations with many messages it would not always show – thanks to Michael Lebor for that report).
The GTDInbox Preferences screen has moved into Gmail (accessible from the sidebar). The reason for this is to make way for the Chrome port (i.e. to make preferences less Firefox specific). It’s not very pretty yet, but it is functional!
We’ve also done lots of work to increase performance – it should be noticeably faster.
I know the red Error Warning box has been an irritation for those of you who were suffering problems, but it really has enabled us to fix bugs faster than at any time in our history. We’re hopeful that we’re getting closer to a point where the red box will appear less and less (and we will keep going until that is ‘never’). Thank you so much for your patience with this.
(If, after installing 3.0.17, you still have any problems, do not hesitate to drop us an email – support@gtdinbox.com).
We’re going to continue to fixing any problems that come up, but we’re also switching back to new feature development. Expect the next release later this week.
Hi guys,
Just a quick update on the state of GTDInbox Plus Beta roll out…
Rolling out to Donators and the Waiting List
When Peyton previously announced that all invitations had been sent, he meant only people who had agreed to accept potential instability by being the first people into the system. We’re now ready to send the rest of the invites, so expect an email this week. We will start with donators and then move onto the Waiting List.
Updated GTDInbox Plus Tour
We just uploaded a quick and simple tour of the GTDInbox Plus features tohttp://www.gtdinbox.com/tourplus.html.
Account Management – Secondary (Personal) Accounts
On your account management page you can now add a secondary (personal) email address to use GTDInbox on. This means you can buy Plus for your work account, and also run it on your home account.
(You can also now change the email account GTDInbox Plus works on. This means you can migrate it to a different account, or if you accidently entered the wrong email address on sign up, you can easily correct it).
The Next GTDInbox Plus Feature
We are continuing to focus all our resources on fixing all the new errors reported by GTDInbox’s Error Warning System (although it might be a little irritating while it discovers previously unnoticed problems, it’s possibly the greatest step forward we’ve ever taken towards identifying and fixing problems little & large within GTDInbox – we are getting there!).
I hope work will begin on the next Plus feature at the end of this week, probably to be released early next week. Keep an eye on the blog!
Great news for users of older – and experimental – versions of Firefox (particularly on Linux): I believe we’ve fixed a big loading issue, first identified by Davide B – thanks to all who wrote in about it.
We’ve also stopped the new Google Buzz from showing an error in the GTDInbox warning box, and several other small fixes.
As usual, you can download it immediately from http://www.gtdinbox.com/gettingstarted.htm
Expect another blog post about the Plus accounts later today, and another release early next week!
GTDInbox 3.0.13 builds on the bug fixing work of 3.0.12 by:
* Fix additional loading issues we’ve discovered, especially for new/upgrading users
* Stop the ‘Labeling Box’ being added many times to a conversation (thanks Michael L!)
* Ensure magnifying glass and labeling box correctly added when you click a normal Gmail label (thanks Jorg!)
Get it from http://www.gtdinbox.com/gettingstarted.htm
Assuming no high priority problems arise, for our next release, we’re planning to address:
* Stop the harmless-but-irritating warnings shown when you view the new Buzz
* Make the red Warning Box a preference
* Try to fix problems with old or obscure versions of Firefox (as suffered by David B, Chuck and Sabrina)
* Any new problems uncovered by the fixes in 3.0.13
We are aiming for a Friday release (tomorrow).
I’m also going to do a little polishing on the Plus Account System website:
* Make it possible to change the account you use Plus with
* Make it possible to add a secondary personal email address to use Plus on
If I may add one more side note, I’m keen for everyone to understand why we’ve had a recent flurry of issues and why they’re unlikely to be such a problem in the future.
Previously, Gmail provided us with the inbuilt means to know when Gmail had loaded, when a user was viewing a thread list (e.g. the inbox) and when they were viewing a conversation — which is very critical to GTDInbox. About two weeks ago, this started to be removed, and all addons working with Gmail were forced to find an alternate solution. Together with Michael at Integrated Gmail, we worked on building a custom and elegant solution – and we found one. However, given it was both brand new and affected every part of GTDInbox, it’s had some teething problems. I believe those problems are now close to being fixed, and we are left with a new and stable core to GTDInbox that is unlikely to break in the future.
