threadsy blog

Faster with a ton of new stuff: Folders, Drafts, Simpler UI, and more

March 9, 2010 at 5:03 pm scott 26 comments

A big release today. We’ve been working on this one for a while, it touches most of threadsy in one way or another. You’ll notice some major changes right off the bat. Here’s a quick walkthrough of what’s new:

Faster by leaps and bounds

Once you login, you’ll notice right away that we cut the loading wait down big time; it takes just 1/5th the time it used to.

We also improved performance in most areas of threadsy, such as the address-autocomplete, sending messages, composing messages, switching to folders, and filtering to accounts. You’ll find the whole threadsy experience snappier.

To make threadsy even faster, we recommend upgrading your browser to the latest version. Recent versions have improved Javascript speed greatly, and threadsy uses a breathtaking amount of Javascript. For example, the latest Firefox 3.6 boosted Javascript performance by 70% from 3.0 and other browsers are even faster. As these performance gains continue, threadsy will benefit directly.

What’s on tap? Drafts.

One thing you’ll notice right away is a new drafts tab. For you procrastinaters out there, we’ve added the ability to save drafts of email messages. You can save a message as a draft by clicking the save draft button while you’re composing a new email message. To view all of your current drafts, click the drafts tab at the top. Note that only drafts you save while using threadsy will be shown in the threadsy drafts folder.

And you’ve got mail folders

Since we launched our private beta, we’ve heard a chorus of requests to support all of your email folders in threadsy. We previously introduced the ability to move email messages to any of your folders. We’ve finally completed the other major piece of the puzzle: now you can read your messages from any of your email folders directly in threadsy! The redesigned top navigation (see below) lets you filter to any folder from any email account.

A few additional notes on our folder support:

• We import Gmail labels and refer to them as folders in threadsy. If a Gmail message has more than one label, we’ll show it in multiple folders on threadsy.
• Hotmail folders are not supported. Wish we could but POP3 doesn’t support it!
• For now you need to create, rename, and delete folders in your source service.
• See our post on archiving non-gmail messages for more details on how that works.
• We haven’t been able to fully test all of your IMAP accounts, so there may be some unknown issues. If you find issues please let us know.

Simplified navigation

We’ve completely overhauled the top navigation experience for both Inbound and Unbound messages. Based on usability testing, usage, your feedback, and the need to accommodate more features, we went back to the drawing board and designed a new navigation UI with simplicity in mind.

We reduced the overall number of buttons and links shown from 28 to 20 and reduced the visual weight while adding some important new features. We kept all of the power, added more, and transformed it from heavy & complex to light & simple. Here’s a walkthrough of what’s new:

Inbound: on the Inbound side you’ll see 4 tabs:

• inbound: all of your Inbound. The number indicates the total number of unread messages in your Inbound across all of your accounts. Click the Inbound tab again while it’s selected to manually check for new messages. Note that threadsy automatically checks for new messages frequently on a timer when you’re logged in, so a manual refresh isn’t necessary unless you want to check immediately.
• drafts: your threadsy drafts, as discussed above
• sent: your sent messages from all accounts
• more: hover over the more tab and you’ll see a dropdown menu with these options:

• trash: your trash messages from all accounts
• archived: your archived messages from all accounts
• unread: all unread messages in your Inbound
• starred: all starred messages in your Inbound
• individual accounts: click the account name to see just the Inbox for that account.

To filter the account further or to see just messages from a specific folder in the account, hover over the right arrow to see these additional options:

Unbound: on the Unbound side, we’ve tightened up the navigation UI and made it consistent with the new Inbound navigation:

New retweet support

On the Twitter side, we’ve added support for the support for new retweet standard. Click the retweet action on Unbound or Inbound tweets. When a tweet has been retweeted by you or someone you follow, it will show a retweet icon next to it and you’ll see the original tweeter’s photo large and the retweeter’s photo smaller.

Last but not least: improved reliability

Since our last update we’ve nipped a bushel of bugs and will be updating our support forum with the details. If you stumble on anything not quite right, please report it and we’ll investigate.

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