Profilactic Mashup - grunwald2.0

Disqus: Re: Podio for Google Apps: What happens in your inbox, doesn’t have to stay in your inbox

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 19:34:14 GMT

Wow the Google Apps and GMail Integration is the best since sliced bread! (And the "ActiveInbox" GMail plugin.) It even works without authentication or installing a plugin, just wow!

Disqus: Re: Condé Nast Digital – behind the websites of the world’s most stylish magazines

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 19:21:54 GMT

Will Condé Nast Digital UK ever publish their "tailor made Tasks App" to the PODIO Appstore? I'd be really grateful to see it there! Nice brief case study, definitely convinces.

Disqus: Re: Condé Nast Digital – behind the websites of the world’s most stylish magazines

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 19:21:44 GMT

Will Condé Nast Digital UK ever publish their "tailor made Tasks App" to the PODIO Appstore? I'd be really grateful to see it there! Nice brief case study, definitely convinces.

Disqus: Re: Condé Nast Digital – behind the websites of the world’s most stylish magazines

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 19:20:54 GMT

Will Condé Nast Digital UK ever publish their "tailor made Tasks App" to the PODIO Appstore? I'd be really grateful to see it there! Nice brief case study, definitely convinces.

Disqus: Re: Condé Nast Digital – behind the websites of the world’s most stylish magazines

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 19:20:51 GMT

Will Condé Nast Digital UK ever publish their "tailor made Tasks App" to the PODIO Appstore? I'd be really grateful to see it there! Nice brief case study, definitely convinces.

Disqus: Re: Getting Email Done?

Sat, 10 Dec 2011 10:17:41 GMT

Dear AI Team, I didn't yet fully read or answer your lengthy post, even less so all the comments.

What I'd suggest is to try to keep the questions to a mimimum and insteasd spelling out your ideas visually with Balsamiq. I recently noticed you used it, only after I discovered the software itself! (Before I wondered how / why you made such a sophisticated mockup. ^^)

So I would make the AI users aware of Balsamiq (http://www.balsamiq.com/) and it's 7-day trial period and let them draw up their ideas in there and link / upload them to this thread!

Disqus: Re: Spudgy Loves Canada

Sun, 20 Nov 2011 11:51:54 GMT

Am I the only one who HAD TO watch Spudgy in 1080p Full-HD? :D

Disqus: Re: ActiveInbox 4.0.3.2 Restores Status Buttons

Mon, 14 Nov 2011 08:03:20 GMT

Well that's nice, but I think that can't be the intention, can it?
Because I can't imagine that these are actions applicable to individual e-mails or conversations, because then those wouldn't be common "settings" but individual actions that don't belong into this area imho.

Disqus: Re: ActiveInbox 4.0.3.2 Restores Status Buttons

Sun, 13 Nov 2011 03:38:51 GMT

Yes I am! Just have a look at the screenshot in my other post, it shows how it looks for me.
Hint: Not like it looks for you (of which I'd appreciate a screenshot, by the way! :)).

Disqus: Re: ActiveInbox 4.0.3.2 Restores Status Buttons

Sat, 12 Nov 2011 10:15:14 GMT

More bugs in the settings window under "Overview" of "configure labels":
Under "Suggested label types", "Projects" don't show, even though they're a removable category. But then again "References" and "Contexts" show even in the case I already have them added. I frankly don't wish to see them. So if it should not be possible to display them dynamically, then try to make the whole configuration display more dense, right now I feel like I have to click around and scroll too much to get access to all the relevant settings.

Secondly, I just noticed I still cannot REMOVE labels! Where did the option go? I can only "upgrade" existing, classic GMail labels to AI labels, but I don't want to do that. Where did the "edit" button go?

Disqus: Re: ActiveInbox 4.0.3.2 Restores Status Buttons

Sat, 12 Nov 2011 09:45:43 GMT

First of all, I have never seen the bar (style) displayed in the first screenshot and I don't understand what you want to say to us with this. And you're the English native speakers, not me. ;)

Secondly, the new "preferences" dropdown is a clear design FAIL out of the book. Because it is a dropdown. Why make one when there is just one button?? You could've easily put this one button into the bar itself. I attached a screenshot also noting that I don't understand what the white space inbetween is or shall be?

Thirdly, a BIG design issue: Why are pinned labels showing twice??
In my projects folder I have five pinned labels, while now there is so much space taken that the projects folder needs a scroll bar that it didn't need before, because the pinned labels still show in and of itself in the list. But they should be hidden! This is true for both your new vertical bar AND the processing bar" inside of e-mails themselves! Only that without the green "pin" icons is it visually totally unclear that these are pinned labels !! (Is this a bug?)
All in all, these constant changes and no clear colour setting needs a major brainstorming from you!
My idea as an example:

* All pinned labels have a clear, all-over green background (at 80% transparency to make it look smoother)
* All applied labels (both pinned and unpinned, because in this situation it makes no difference anymore!) have a blueish (again 80% transparent) background colour
* All non-applied and non-pinned labels have a white/grey background (same like now..)

Such a colour scheme would make it totally clear (and I hope you will finally decide to stick to one and not change that in every other release...) what the situation is. This way one could finally concentrate on processing ones e-mails instead of always wondering (from the colourless interface!) if a label is already applied (this is the worst right now, just being "bold"ed) or pinned!

Fourth: You still try to sell us a half-visible label solution that is not true towards GTD- and psychological principles! As long as I can't keep my project + context + references labels permanently visible (i.e. outside the actual menu, thus like you offer it for the "status" labels!) by pinning them, it is a step back from the old design!
If you really think (even though I didn't hear that yet) that is a bad idea, because you'd e.g. assume that people pin labels for APPLYING them quicker vs. ACCESSING e-mails labelled with them quicker (after all, if we'd really delete or process and then delete all e-mails, we wouldn't need or use ActiveInbox!), then I can only think of one solution: Distinguish (functionally/technically) between items pinned for permanent visibility and the ones that a user pins for quick application on existing e-mails.

And last: ActiveInbox is broken for the new Mozilla Firefox 9 beta. I'm not on dev (only on Chrome), but always on betas, sorry.

Disqus: Re: ActiveInbox 4.0.2.38 fixes a few glitches – and I have a question about pinning…

Mon, 07 Nov 2011 03:45:06 GMT

Dear Andy,

I answered your questions in my other reply. For your comment: "The Google Bar is the top-most thing in Gmail, ... I believe it's rarely used, and would benefit from being auto-hidden." I totally agree with you. :)

And for "I think the best way to speed up labeling is to reduce decision making time, by making wrong-decisions quickly fixable." Yes, I also agree with you on this one. On the rest there: Yes, yes, yes! :)

"...the right-conversation-sidebar ... that has become the "people" place. It's either Gmail's own People box; or Rapportive's box. Either way, it's not us!"

Ok. Is there any way or have you ever thought about the white-space (rather: grey space) next to the big Google search bar? Or is there a way to replay the silly, unnecessary "GoogleMail" icon? All this space, I think it is free and might be usable for sth.? (I of course don't know if the latter one would be a heavy change. Everything that affects loading performance overproportionally should be avoided imho...)

Disqus: Re: ActiveInbox 4.0.2.38 fixes a few glitches – and I have a question about pinning…

Mon, 07 Nov 2011 03:39:58 GMT

Dear Andy,

I understand that point and I agree with it. I agree with doing whats right and not bogging down a software with features no one needs! But I think we're far from that with AI ! Unfortunately you didn't answer below the post you are referencing to?? (This: http://www.activeinboxhq.com/b...

I read it again and I think it is crystal clear. I wonder about your outlook on the system. I always thought of AI as an "GTD" system, that you know GTD and that you agree with the problems inherent when not using it. Visibility is a big part. How can you create responsibility without (permanent) visibility?

Maybe I should be more clear about my usage case: I'd expect that you (as you luckily kept the very important "Finished" status label) hide all my "Finished" e-mails from the label count of each label, or that at least when clicking on a label in the AI - and not the GMail - Interface (and that's the difference!) I will get guided directly to the "Active Results", which hide my finished labels.

So it boils down to the whole question: Would anyone ever look actually his labelled e-mails that DO NOT have a status? And: Why would an e-mail have no status? The answer is clearly: Because before AI and also after AI we will use filter and label application rules! It does not matter if we filter away an e-mail out of our already full inboxes (which went want to bring to zero, right?) with a normal (GMail) or an "advanced" AI label. In the end, an e-mail is there, mostly even unread, with no status and it is UNPROCESSED! Thus, this is the one reason we will still look into our label side- (or top-...) bar!

Now if I have UNPROCESSED e-mails with whatever - doesn't matter if reference or context - labels (which admittedly is not true GTD methodology, but in fact batch processing > status labelling / 100% GTD), what do you think, Andy, should we do with them? Hide them in a dropdown? Why pin them if they don't show up visibly?? That is my question! It makes no sense to me! It is not so much about top- or sidebar maybe (I just lack the imagination for the top-bar...), but about visibility.

If we got no incentive to process incoming e-mails or just no knowledge, how is AI then helping me?
After all this outcome would (speaking overly drastic) keep my tasks further away from me than the "plain vanilla" GMail !

So, why no knowledge? Simple:

Especially in a job environment or your environment, you will not only get newsletters and repeated "marketing" e-mails, but also repeated e-mails from individuals, so you might label and filter them. Yes, it might be my responsibility that I did so, but still: Now that they're hidden (out of my [priority] inbox even), you expect me to check all my four to seven label category dropdowns all the time? (Assuming of course that there is NO e-mail counter visible, just like there is NONE in your blog post example!!)That is pull, not push. It's like manual e-mail on my smartphone and like typing in nyt.com instead of getting the RSS feed.

To sum it up: For me the core principle is visibility, after all that is why we all pinned labels in the old version, didn't we?? I'm highly confused how you ignore your old interface in this regard! So what I want is: If I pin a label, it should be either fully visible (including e-mail counter) or at least in the category there should be a sign of how many unread and/or new (labelled) e-mails there are in each "category"!

Because I sure don't want to have to search around for hours for two different extensions for Chrome and Firefox, to get my e-mail notifications as a pop-up (at the moment I don't!), then having to change the extension or be otherwise annoyed, because it is broken by the recent browser update!

The beauty of AI is indeed, that it is kinda more web-/GMail based and not browser-based (as far as I see I never had problems in any browser version with AI, thanks! :)) so concerning my e-mail management (I also have a desktop client in which I can pin labels including e-mail counts: Postbox 3 !) I would be happy if I could continue to keep it to the minimum.

Disqus: Re: ActiveInbox 4.0.2.38 fixes a few glitches – and I have a question about pinning…

Mon, 07 Nov 2011 03:21:02 GMT

I have another question / potential visual bug. Please see: http://awesomescreenshot.com/0...

Disqus: Re: ActiveInbox 4.0.2.38 fixes a few glitches – and I have a question about pinning…

Sun, 06 Nov 2011 14:27:41 GMT

Dear Andy,

thanks for your feedback! Ok, I am sorry not having read this before posting my recent rant. ;)

The thing is, YES, me personally did not see any bad - or rather only good - points for the always visible (and only one click away) labels! This is what made AI so great for me! I have to wait long enough for e-mails to load, for label my e-mails with usually 3-4 labels (status, project, context and reference), why not save a click and some time here?

In the long run I'd even expect (or hope) to somehow speed up the labelling process! Because the current system doesn't propose me labels often or not even the right ones. Also unlabelling / relabelling is too slow. Often I actually ONLY need to relabel because GMail (or AI / my browser / my www connection / my laptop ?!?!?) was too slow, so I misclicked !!

So yes, I understand your reasoning about the tech side, unfortunately that doesn't come across to me clearly (still) in the blog post (or former blog posts), so I can only recommend to you to emphasize this! If there is no other way, I'm sure we'll find a solution!

But then again, how about utilizing the space RIGHT next to an e-mail? Think about the "rapportive" plugin! How come they manage to utilize all the vertical space and you tell me it is impossible? ;) (Ok maybe they got some problems now too...)

All in all I just hope GMail / Google won't limit you and thus us too much, after all we need to continue to work with AI, so I hope it won't get worse in this regard. ;)

Thanks again for your work, even over the weekend!

Disqus: Re: ActiveInbox 4.0.2.38 fixes a few glitches – and I have a question about pinning…

Sun, 06 Nov 2011 14:20:57 GMT

I could not one-click pinned labels to work with them? I would not see how many labelled e-mails I have with label X and/or unread e-mails I have with label X?

Disqus: Re: ActiveInbox 4.0.2.38 fixes a few glitches – and I have a question about pinning…

Sun, 06 Nov 2011 14:19:04 GMT

Dear AI team, thanks for the explanations!

Unfortunately, it still doesn't make it clear to me in part, i.e. what is the "Google bar"? I've never hear of it or seen it in writing, you may at it to your above screenshots, what part of the Google interface is the "Google bar" and "review bar(!)" ? I don't even know if you mean a part of the natural interface or of AI...

Additionally I disagree with the "mental cluttering" through the sidebar!
Rather, a vertical only concept, is cluttering and HIDING my items from view, BECAUSE:

a). As said, it might end up getting to cluttered - for the individual user who has his individual preferences. My horizontal space is more valuable to me than the small sidebar. Thus the high-impact things need to go there: Statutes and e.g. maybe as proposed just project folders to access them quickly.

b). If labels can be pinned but DON'T show up like statuses now (with their actual name and number!) they are effectively hidden until I force myself to (constantly?!) check on my categories!! (With categories I mean "projects", "contexts", "references", "service announcements" etc.) How is that efficient and driving me to progress on my open tasks? (I think it'll be OK (even for me ;)), but I just want to look at the worst case!) Sure enough the labels are not showing in your example (unless they actually "pop-out", which seems not to be your intention), but they indeed show (also in your example) in the sidebar!

Finally, for the sidebar:
c). If you (everyone) indeed knows (!) that the sidebar contains only labels from certain categories (e.g. only references or contexts or both) AND maybe even (as before??) those categories get explicitly named as well as ordered only within their own categories, where is the mental clutter? I don't see clutter.

Disqus: Re: ActiveInbox 4.0.2.38 fixes a few glitches – and I have a question about pinning…

Sun, 06 Nov 2011 02:40:06 GMT

Like it was before 4.0.2.37? ;-) Maybe I severely lack imagination, but what is the difference or improvement over the old solution who did all that? Only that it was not (absolutely) fixed right at the top of the label area (but maybe that was a bug anyways)?

Disqus: Re: ActiveInbox 4.0.2.38 fixes a few glitches – and I have a question about pinning…

Sun, 06 Nov 2011 02:37:19 GMT

Dear AI team, what is the difference between proposal 1) and the way it worked before?
At least in the in e-mail label bar? So yes, it is a good idea anyways and you should do it, BUT how is that related to the position of the (context, references etc.) labels in general? There is no connection.

And on the other note I also don't get the difference between 2) and the old implementation (except maybe moving the To-Do's and - in my humble opinion - the projects to the top!), why not save yourself some time (for bugfixing and getting the settings "online" again!) and just put the old sidebar where it was?
Right below the trash bin, overtaking all the unnecessary 0815 GMail labels!

I don't want to see the original GMail interface, I think your implementation was brilliant !!!

So PLEASE don't "blend in" with GMail, it's too "unobstrusive", I will never find you. And I need sublabels and the option to dynamically (de-)pin ActiveInbox labels, I don't want to give that away for no reason!!!

Disqus: Re: ActiveInbox 4.0.2.38 fixes a few glitches – and I have a question about pinning…

Sun, 06 Nov 2011 02:32:46 GMT

I agree with Luis! I see this going down a dangerously wrong direction otherwise!