63 Comments
User's avatar
Michael Leggett's avatar

And before anyone asks, yes, Simplify v2 is still going out this week. I aim to update all v1 customers today inside Gmail.

Michael Leggett's avatar

And by update, I mean, notify. The actual update will go out in the next couple days.

me's avatar

Just got the notifications, looks amazing, can't wait!

Abhinav Bharadwaj R's avatar

Hey Boss, Just got Notified about the Update! Hyper Excited to See the Updated version in action. Kudos to the Developers and Tester. Lovin yo' All. ❤❤

Charlie Whiton's avatar

CANNOT WAIT, TAKE MY MONEY

Braden Kowitz's avatar

Woohoo! I'm excited for this.

Carlos Rebolledo Aguirre's avatar

🚀🚀 Excelente !!!! Fuerza y muy contento de poder utilizar Simplify

Tim's avatar

Profile pictures in list view is literally one of the things I wanted to see in Gmail for the longest time. Hope you get it to work. ☺️

Jeremy's avatar

Simplify is AMAZING. Thank you.

I'd pay for Bundles. I miss them more than any other feature of Inbox. It's completely sensible how difficult bundles is to implement on the add-on side as apposed to in the source code. Hope you're able to figure it out!

Matt Lovett's avatar

Looks awesome!

With bundles I loved the ability to only get X bundle once per day in the morning, that way throughout the day the emails didn't bother me and I could just triage those kind of emails once per day.

I'd love to see this kind of feature reappear.

Michael Leggett's avatar

100% -- that was the best part of bundles!

Rob's avatar

I've really enjoyed following your updates and I find simplify makes Gmail so much better, it almost fills the void left by the demise of inbox.

2 things I liked about inbox and still miss were pins+sweep for fast inbox processing while keeping the items I want. Pins were of course effectively stars. It works well with the starred toggle at the top.

The second feature I really miss was expanding/opening emails within the inbox, it just felt so much quicker to get in and out of emails.

Are either of these features possible, please?

Michael Leggett's avatar

Pin and sweep, yes. Expand inline, no.

Rosa's avatar

Just chiming in to say I also miss the expand/opening emails inline. It was part of what made bundles so fast and efficient to quickly glance at. Though I get it may be not be possible or a priority to implement. :( Happy to see pin and sweep are doable, though!

Michael Alliman's avatar

I'm getting really confused: So many things seem to be wonky now. Are there any known conflicts with other extensions? (e.g. no "focused" reply any more, can't delete an attachment, the formatting bar obscures the "send" button, etc.) Help. I love it, but it's now slowing me down frequently.

Michael Leggett's avatar

Can you send an issue report? https://simpl.fyi/support shows you how

Michael Alliman's avatar

Yep. One report per issue? Or can I combine them?

Michael Leggett's avatar

If you use Safari -- an update *just* went out that fixed a few things. (Apple blocked my last update because I linked to my blog post on pricing and they somehow thought I was violating their rules about in-app purchases)

Michael Leggett's avatar

If via email or Google Form, fine to combine them. If via Github, would be nice to separate them out.

Kit Clement's avatar

Since the update, I've noticed that when typing emails, my view scrolls down slightly with each key I type. It'll get to the bottom of the page, and then once a new line break is made it resumes the slow scroll. Very irritating to watch my text move as I type up emails in this. Any idea what might be causing this?

Michael Leggett's avatar

This bug is the most mysterious one in all of v2. I've had it happen like 3 times and never been able to figure out what on earth is going on. And I only had a couple reports from 300 testers over 5 months. A hard refresh (shift + click on browser refresh) should fix it. Let me know if it doesn't.

Kit Clement's avatar

And the scroll seems to be back now.

Michael Leggett's avatar

:(

I hate to ask... but restart browser? I'd offer to jump on a video call and try and figure it out together but I've literally spent hours trying to figure out this one only to have it just go away.

Kit Clement's avatar

It came back after restarting just now too. This has persisted for a few weeks now and seems to frequently pop up for me. I'd be happy to help you debug over a call it if you think my situation could pinpoint the issue.

Michael Leggett's avatar

That is a kind offer -- email me at hi@simpl.fyi and let's set something up

Kit Clement's avatar

That seemed to do it, thanks!

Sam Talcott's avatar

When moving through large threads I often use "enter" to expand a message in the thread to read it and then "enter" again to condense it again. Now the second "enter" initiates a reply. Is there a different command to re-condense (Probably not the right word but hopefully you know what I mean) the thread? Or a way to disable the new shortcut for "enter" so it reverts to its normal usage?

Michael Leggett's avatar

There are shortcuts to expand/collapse all the messages in the thread but that doesn't sound like what you want.

Are you using n/p to focus messages to expand? I could probably skip having enter = reply if you use n/p. Would that solve the problem? Or I could add the Enter key as a setting you can disable.

Sam Talcott's avatar

I do use n/p, so that would definitely work!

Michael Leggett's avatar

I thought about this more and decided the current behavior is preferable. Enter will expand a message and then open a reply if already expanded.

To support your use case, I have added a setting for this keyboard shortcut (the only one Simplify added that didn't have one). If you disable it, the enter key will still open a message IF you have Gmail's keyboard shortcuts on. In a conversation, it will toggle the message open/closed.

Will ship with v2.2.3 tomorrow.

Kris's avatar

Why is one email in the list always darker than the others? How can I turn that off? It's super distracting and confusing.

Michael Leggett's avatar

It is the keyboard focus (the item that will be acted on if you hit enter or any other keyboard shortcut).

Michael Leggett's avatar

If keyboard shortcuts are disabled, it only shows up if you press up/down

Kris's avatar

Hmm, I disabled all the keyboard shortcuts and I still see it on a fresh load.

Michael Leggett's avatar

Sorry I wasn't clearer -- you don't need to disable SImplify's awesome shortcuts (leave those on) -- it is if you disable Gmail's shortcuts. Hit the [?] key while in Gmail and half way down the screen, there is an option to disable most of Gmail's shortcuts. Let me know if that doesn't fix it.

Kris's avatar

Ah, I see. This is the equivalent of the small blue side bar in the regular UI. Hmm. I'd be nice if were less intrusive.

Michael Leggett's avatar

I'm seeing that in some themes (like the light gray color theme) it is WAY more intrusive than intended. What theme do you use? Want to send me a screenshot of what you saw to hi@simpl.fyi?

Kenny's avatar

Any news on the release?

Michael Leggett's avatar

Rolled out to 100% on Chrome and Safari. Submitted to Edge but Microsoft usually takes a while. Will dig into issues with Firefox tomorrow that prevented the release there. And hope to push the new Simplify website.

Brooster's avatar

Loving it on Chrome. Any update on the Firefox release? Thanks Michael!

Michael Leggett's avatar

Made a lot of progress today. I think I'll be able to push it tomorrow.

Mikołaj Cempla's avatar

I'm unable to understand what makes a giant like Google, with so many people and resources, unable to deliver anything close to Simplyify Gmail. I'm super excited about the update, checking twice a day for news! I will definately contribute financially.

Chris's avatar

Yes, Bundles!!!!!

Shashank's avatar

Great overview Michael! I've one feature request, which I think the Quick filters/command menu will cover but stating it here anyways.

So, I've this perfect system setup for managing my newsletters. Whenever i subscribe to a new newsletter, the first mail pops up in my Updates tab, then I copy the email address of that mail and create a filter :

1. add the mail id in From section, then

2. tick 2 checkboxes:

Skip the Inbox (Archive it)

Apply the label: [Newsletter] // Newsletter is a label which i've created

Even though i've to do this only once, the trouble is it's a lot of clicks so sometimes I get lazy and then it gets messy. Also, in the above workflow, sometimes I use the "Filter messages like these" option in the very beginning but many a times, it populates the filter's "has the words" category with some mail list ID, so i then resort to copying the sender ID manually and pasting it in the "From" field.

I hope the details I described were clear, i tried to be as descriptive as possible. lemme know if anything's confusing.

I am hopeful that Simplify will be able to solve this someday :). what do you think?

Shashank's avatar

also, since we're talking about filters, one of the other things I dislike about them is that say I unsubscribe from a newsletter, then I don't need that filter now, but there's no way to clean up Filters (within Settings) in a smart way.

This isn't really a priority as it isn't exactly affecting my daily workflow, but still just mentioning all my gmail problems here, since you are pretty good at solving them 😅.

I was thinking of making some sort of setup within GSheet via Google AppScript for this Filter management, but on hold for now.

Michael Leggett's avatar

Mostly I was thinking about offering an option to group filters by certain things (sender name, action taken, label applied, etc) so you can see all the filters that do similar things and more easily manage them. There is more I could do with API access and I'll probably think of more when I dig into it.

Shashank's avatar

cool looking forward to it!

Mauricio Fagundes's avatar

I've just read that bundles are not yet in the new version. Sad, but I intend to continue to support the project. But there's also something that sould be addressed by Google since it's launch: the filter interface. It was a shame in 2007, after 13 years it is just ridiculous.

Michael Leggett's avatar

Filters is on my list too... I think there are a few things I can do on the interface in Settings.