About GTDInbox
Overview
GTDInbox is a Firefox extension designed to exclusively enhance Gmail (Google Mail). It is open-source donationware, ensuring that whatever happens in the future, it can survive & thrive! GTDInbox is part of the Productive Firefox family - a collection of addons with the basic aim of reclaiming control of our online lives.
Development
Main Author
GTDInbox was primarily developed by Andy Mitchell.
Contact him at andy@productivefirefox.com.
Significant Contributors
Paul Thompson
(Contributing from January 2008 - Present)
Paul has enjoyed the open source community off and on for the last 10 years. For
about a year he headed the Squirrelmail project team. Currently his open source
development interests lie within the realm of GTD applications.
After a brief period wrestling with some of the darker sides of the codebase,
Paul went on to develop the collapsable label tree and a prettier way to segment
the various label dimensions (Statuses/Projects/etc).
History
GTDInbox began life in August 2006, where it developed in isolation, with little more intent than it seemed like a promising concept. In September that year, it was unassumingly released to a few productivity blogs, where it caught the imagination of the community who recognised some inherent value in improving their email chaos, but could not quite put a finger on why. It would not be until a year later that revamping email systems would come back into vogue, with the likes of Xobni and various other startups aiming to define 'Inbox 2.0' and take advantage of the productivity gains of the latent social network found in your email.
Over the next year it rolled along under its own steam, with steady improvements and continued good will from the blogosphere. During this time it won many great reviews from users, and featured in the .Net Magazine's Top 50 Firefox Addons, reaching #12. A year after it's first release, it had hit about 70,000 downloads. Things were progressing somewhat leisurely - certainly peacefully - until one fateful day in November 2007 when Google announced it was completely revamping Gmail, which in the process would break GTDInbox.
Thus began the scramble to ready GTDInbox for the new Gmail. This raised a difficult decision, to 'patch it up', or to completely remake it. GTDInbox had several flaws, for one a few conceptual mistakes had been made based on pure inexperience with using a productivity system in Gmail - it was after all the first of its kind. It also suffered from an immature architecture, that manifested itself as slow & memory intensive performance that would be hard to maintain in the future. It quickly became obvious that no matter how painful, a complete rebuild was the best option. Fortunately, this brought about unexpected benefits, as the design process began to reveal a lot of other very cool potential for GTDInbox, most notably around analysing data within a Gmail account to find relationships between threads, contacts and labels.
This tale ends on the cusp of GTDInbox 2.0's release. Here's to a safe journey!
Future Roadmap
New Features
- 2.1
- More visual clues in label hierarchy for unread messages
- The option to use a horizontal label layout for space conservation
- Misc Usability Tweaks
- 'Reply to Self' to add personal notes to ongoing discussions
- 2.2
- Sync Settings & Stats Across Multiple Machines
- Task/Project Printing
- Countdown Timer to Speed Up Compose / Reply
- 2.3
- Customise Dashboard
Possible Features
- Detailed profiles for contacts, helping you understand them better
- Pipelined Workflows
- Better Stats, Showing Graphs for Contact & Email Frequency, Estimated Time to Reply, Contacts Not Spoken to Recently
- Less reliance on search (e.g. all Next Actions listed inline, rather than doing a new search)
- Sync Settings, Stats and Labels Within Teams
- Effective monitoring of where your billable time goes
Donate!
The rate of progress is linked to the the flow of money to support development. So, if you love GTDInbox and want to see it do more, give it a healthy donation!
