Simplify Gmail: Bringing the Simplicity of Google Inbox to Gmail
simpl.fyi
simpl.fyi
I've now settled on ticktick for handling my reminders, after testing the Google tasks stuff, Todoist, Any.do, and more. It works well, but does not feel nowhere near as smooth as Inbox.
Never had my inbox so clean, before.
Reminders among emails just makes a lot of sense. I'm going to miss them.
I'd love it if someone could create a Gmail add-on which gets us closer to the ease of use of Inbox reminders.
I liked the simplicity and UI of Todoist, but I had to pay to get the reminder feature. I don't mind paying, but I had no way of testing the feature first.
The main thing that I miss from Inbox (except having everything at the same place) is for the reminders to only show up on the specified time. Ticktick, as many todo apps (all that I've tested) will show me all reminders for a given day.
- The "Trips" feature... so easily you could see your flight details, your hotel details... vs. having to search your email box and having to go through emails upon emails
- The image previews! I do some artwork for my job, and it was SUCH a boon to see the images right there. You could actually click one of them, and preview all the images from an email conversation in a carousel fashion
Any ideas how I may be able to get this in Gmail somehow?
I'm not sure if they extracted it to a dedicated app or if the app was already there and Inbox integrated it, but Google Trips is exactly that.
label:trips
label:finance
label:purchases
label:social
label:updates
label:forums
label:promos
is:pinned
I think you can recreate the "bundle" feature almost by using something like "label:promos in:inbox" to see all the promo labeled emails in your inbox. Then you archive them all at once.
Also the search options are reflected in the url, so can setup links for for the various labels.
There were so many times that I'd snooze an entire bundle of emails about a trip until the monday before the trip, or snooze the 20 emails sent out from a work monitoring system that I need to look into later in the day, or archive an entire bundle of promo emails after glancing in them at the subject lines.
In gmail I hate the tabs because once I look at them they stop being shown as a count in that tab, and I need to select them all and archive them in multiple steps. And if you don't like the tabs, the only other way to organize is by foregoing grouping all together and throwing everything into one messy list.
You didn't need to have them skip the inbox, and instead had one "entry" in the inbox, that entered into the bundles rather than one specific email.
It's not functionnaly too different, but it worked very well with Inbox's permises of "your entire email workload in a single glance" and "let us sort it out for you without you needing to remember to go looking" (eg: if you have one for monster when job searching like the other comment says, you need to remember to go and check your label when job searching, but not do when not job searching, whereas the bundle is there if need be and that's it ... now multiply by 20 different bundles covering everything)
Really though if you've never used Inbox it's hard to explain why people loved it so much. IMO it was the email client of the future. There were just these small details that Inbox provided that made the email experience so much easier and organized. My heart is broken knowing that I won't be able to use it anymore.
You can then further make the search "label:foo in:inbox" to try mimic inboxes label. But that's a custom search and where do you store that? You can only save/create filters, not searches as a label.
So then you have those custom searches, you start archiving items (which is like marking as done in Inbox). But the search isn't smart enough to update. It still shows all the items, you need to refresh or navigate away for it to stop showing the items you just archived that shouldn't match your search anymore.
Actually, one reason I never switched to Inbox was that it wouldn't show you an unread count for labels, so it broke this workflow for me.
It was so, so, so much easier to instantly tell who sent the message with an image there. Even the gmail app has this feature, so I really don't know why it's not in the gmail web UI.
Is there any way to add these back with a plugin like this?
* Bundles: Made it easy to see all categories of emails from the inbox. Gmail offers categories, but you have to switch between them see each ones.
* Task-oriented: The concept of marking an email as Done was genius, and really helped to achieve zero-inbox. At least Archive kinda serve that purpose. You could also mark an entire bundle as Done from a single click if you wanted.
* Snooze: Inbox at one point offered time-based and location-based snoozes. Location-based snoozes were great for people travelling between offices without a well-defined schedule. It allowed me to bring back location-specific tasks once I got there, before they canned it. I also noticed it would even sometimes pick up relevant dates and times mentioned in an email and offer you to snooze up until that time without having to manually do it or choose a preconfigured time. Sadly Gmail only does time-based snoozes, and without the custom time feature.
* Chronological divisions: The emails were separated by days, so all emails that came today were grouped together, yesterday's the same, and so on. It was easy to see what was from today.
* Trips: Having the AI automagically sort and bundle relevant incoming trips together made it easy to find your hotel reservation, plane tickets, etc, and it would even show up a dynamic card with your flight number, departure time, delays, etc. All the useful info was right there.
Inbox was Gmail 2.0 and it was great. Too bad Google decided to regress.
I do like gmail as it is now. Actually, I also like the html version https://mail.google.com/mail/ca/u/0/h/ but because it has all the features of the normal gmail but it loads faster.
This extension is geared towards Inbox users who want some less UI overload but without all the automatic features. Seems more like a coat of paint than a plugin.
Quite the perfect person for the job!
In the abstract, I understand how adoption and usability can turn on subtle and clever design decisions. The sum total of all these little things can definitely lead to a hockey stick uptake.
But I’m still lost on the OP “before” and “after” shots. Looks like the same info to me, just rearranged with different whitespace. Am I totally missing something fundamental?
This extensions seems to be just a skin on gmail that doesn't give any of the inbox functionality. Seems to just replicate that extra whitespace functionality only.
This feels just like a skin for gmail. And it's gone backwards. My view now is narrow with big bars on either side so I see less of the content. I can't mark an email as done.
Opening an email I don't have the archive button anymore. I got reply and forward. Where is archive/mark done feature that is for inbox?
I loved how inbox collected stuff into lists and let me mark done the whole list. Subscribe to a github project? Get all those emails as one list in inbox automatically. Where/how to do that feature in gmail?
I don't understand why ditch inbox, it's lot's better than gmail.
I can't add back bundles or deeper reminders integration. I totally agree that this extension doesn't give you back Inbox. But it makes it a little easier to bare for those that cherished the simple interface along with the wonderful features. We can only hope that Google adds them to Gmail.
So I can have a link that's like a bundle, and can archive all my social media emails in one go.
Is there anything at all like this? I'm still getting the hang of Mutt and setting it up properly, it feels a long way off.
This allows you to use the keyboard ('j'/'k') to navigate through the list of emails, and just hit 'e' on the ones you want to archive. Downside is, the content of the email still loads in the preview pane.
If you don't want emails to automatically be marked as "read" when you select them, you can go to the settings gear, "Inbox" tab, and change the length of time a message is displayed in the preview pane before being marked read to "never".
Those will change every ~week as Google releases a new frontend version. Presumably the lead designer knows that.
How does he intend to keep this extension working?
Lot of forums have moved to Facebook now, so that tab is also sort of obsolete.
Seems like all the backend that’s needed is built into gmail, what’s needed on the client is knowing which labels to display as a bundle.
Inbox made that management drop dead simple. I lament it's loss.
For both this, and your recently deceased, thank you.
http://klinger.io/post/71640845938/dont-drown-in-email-how-t...