A new version of Sortd has been deployed with various improvements.
The only notable new feature is the ability to load directly into Sortd instead of the Gmail interface. This feature can be enabled through the Settings Panel.
This release has been focussed on improving stability and on backend features which will allow us to respond to increasing demand/load more effectively. Some performance improvements have also been made. Many Bugs have also been fixed.
The next release will continue our focus on stability and performance although we might sneak some new features in as well :-)
We are aware of many, many issues, too many to list here.
A new version of Sortd has been deployed with various improvements and features.
A “Follow Up” flag (automatically gets set when Send and Pin is used, alternatively can be set from task actions) has been added as well as a filter to see tasks marked for Follow Up. Additionally a filter has been added for Tasks with Unread email. The “Completed Items” filter has also been enhanced to work with these two new filters. These filters allow you to quickly and easily see tasks which you have unread emails on and or are marked for follow up and as such help you triage and plan what to focus on next. The filters can sometimes be slow and we are actively looking at improving the performance.
The speed of loading the Sortd Inbox for large email accounts has been improved along with the speed of performing Searches from within Sortd. Additionally some performance improvements have been made with regard to switching between folders and particularly the Inbox categories such as Promotions/Updates etc.
Various User Interface (UI) changes have been made most significantly the removal of the “right click” to get to a Tasks action menu. Now a task actions icon will appear when hovering over a task, which when clicked will provide all the current task actions. Various menu and navigation changes have also been made in order to try and simplify the UI. Tasks that contain notes can now also be identified through the newly added “notes” icon on the Tasks when viewed on the organiser panel.
The often requested feature of being able to pin/add an email to a list from the Email Preview has also been added. Additionally when archiving an email from Preview the next email in the Inbox will automatically be displayed.
Various other Bugs, Stability and Reliability Improvements (though there are still many more to go) have been made.
These features are currently very experimental and could change significantly or be dropped altogether and as such are usually marked “Beta” (although the whole product is still in Beta, these features are significantly more so). Please send us your thoughts and comments as we would love to hear what you think.
We have added an Inbox filter for “Unread email” (not marked as Beta but is very much so).
WARNING: When this filter is applied new email will not be displayed and one will have to return to the normal Inbox view to see incoming email. We continue to seek ways to improve this feature.
We are aware of many, many issues, too many to list here.
Some Improvements to the Show/Hide Completed, but still not working 100%.
Various other Bugs, Stability and Reliability Improvements (though there are still many more to go) have been made.
These features are currently very experimental and could change significantly or be dropped altogether and as such are marked Beta (although the whole product is still in Beta, these features are significantly more so). Please send us your thoughts and comments as we would love to hear what you think.
WARNING: These features will modify your Gmail Inbox and as such should only be used by users who are comfortable with Sortd and understand the consequences of enabling these settings. The settings can be found under “Advanced” on the Settings control.
Archive Email in Gmail when Archiving a Task
When creating a task from an email the email will be archived in Gmail. This setting will keep your Sortd and Gmail Inbox’s synchronised, so that you don’t see a different version of your Inbox when viewing it in Gmail vs Sortd.
Don’t Show Email on Task in the Inbox
When a new email is received on a thread that has been added to a task, it will not show in the inbox. If the setting above is also On it will cause your newly arrived email to be archived in Gmail immediately. CAUTION should be taken here as you will not see a new email in the Inbox and if you miss the “unread “ symbol on the task you could miss the email altogether.
We are aware of many, many issues, too many to list here but in particular we are aware that the Show/Hide Completed toggle is getting out of sync and will be fixed soon.
We are aware of an issue whereby users may get logged out of Sortd and shown an error page that says that there are “Too many simultaneous Connections” on Gmail. We are working on reducing the cause of this problem (to the degree that we can control it).
On 1 March 2015 we released a new version of Sortd in anticipation of our presence at Launch Festival on 2 March 2015.
The biggest and most important improvement by far is the improved speed with which new email is delivered to Sortd. You should see email arriving within seconds or at worst a few minutes after it appears in Gmail which is much quicker than then 5-7 minute delay that would sometimes occur previously.
We have added the ability to hide Sortd using the Sortd tab without activating Sortd so that you can run Sortd in one account and not another without having the Sortd sidebar displayed in the inactive (non-Sortd) accounts Gmail interface.
Creating Tasks from email inside the Gmail interface should now be faster and more reliable. Merging tasks in some cases caused the task to disappear, but this should hopefully be fixed now as well.
Various other Bugs, Stability and Reliability Improvements (though there are still many more to go) have been made.
These features are currently very experimental and could change significantly or be dropped altogether and as such are marked Beta (although the whole product is still in Beta, these features are significantly more so). Please send us your thoughts and comments as we would love to hear what you think.
Import
In anticipation of launching our iPhone and Android applications (tease) we have included a feature which allows you to Import email from Sortd sub-labels. This means that you can use your favourite Mobile Email App, and add the Sortd List label (Sortd sub-label in Gmail) to the email and Sortd will import it into your list.
Sortd does this in the background with no additional input from you, but as it is done on a periodic basis one can force an import by selecting the Import button. Import only works with Sortd sub-labels and not with Gmail labels in general (even if you create a label and list with the same name). Currently Sortd will only import 20 items into a list in any given import iteration and will only import into a Sortd list if there are less than 100 active tasks in the list. This is to prevent the lists from becoming overwhelmingly large (and to prevent filters being defined in Gmail that swamp the lists). Once Sortd has imported the email into a list it will remove the list label from the email, although the main Sortd label will remain. Personal opinion: Lists really should contain tasks that can be considered active work otherwise they just become swamped and then you may as well have left them in your inbox. Obviously we all have exceptions to this rule ;-)
Date View
Date View lets you view your tasks ordered by date using the headings Today, Tomorrow, Soon and Later.
Unfortunately dates are one of those things that are quite complicated in that people use them for different reasons (you will see we changed "Due Date" to just say “Date” as some people prefer the date to represent a Start Date, and we don’t want both as it makes Sortd too complicated - its supposed to be a really simple product).
The idea of Soon and Later becomes an issue in that those terms mean different things to different people, and what date do you set when someone drags a task/email into Soon/Later. Currently we set Soon as 3 days time, and Later as 14 days time, although changing the actual date to be anywhere between 3 and 14 days will leave it in Soon and anything after 14 days will leave it in Later.
Additionally because Date View is real time based, tasks that where scheduled for “Tomorrow”, roll forward to “Today” which means that the Today list can get large if one does not get through the tasks. Hopefully the ease with which someone can just drag the task to the Tomorrow, Soon or Later lists will alleviate this problem to some extent. In the future we may have an option to make the time static, i.e. tasks/emails won’t roll forward based on real time but stay in their relative time columns until moved by the user.
The Today list will also show overdue tasks in red.
All tasks are ordered by date and one cannot actually drag a task up and down within a Date (virtual) list like one can in a normal context (real) list.
Creating a task in a Date (virtual) list will cause a selection box to be displayed allowing one to select the context list the task/email should be added to. It will be added to the top of that list.
We are aware of many, many issues, too many to list here but in particular we are aware that the Show/Hide Completed toggle is getting out of sync and will be fixed in the next release.