After some more days of coding I would like to announce that the alpha version of Jello Dashboard 5.1 is available  for testing:

Get a copy here: http://www.box.net/shared/bx5jx6xkem

Check out version.txt for changes history

Please note:
-Testing is suggested for skilled users
-No installer is available for this version. Just unzip to a folder.
-It is suggested to install JD 5.1 in a different directory
-Backup your Outlook data before running the new version and your existing journal entry settings (if you want to use them)
-If you are using a custom journal folder/entry for your settings, keep a copy of your existing js/customSettings.js (don’t let the new files overwrite it)
-If you are using your existing settings you’re gonna have to reset your widgets. After that your settings will not be able to work with the previous version of JD.

Remember to post your thoughts or bugs you find at the new version’s forum:
http://jello-dashboard.net/forum/viewforum.php?f=10

In the meantime I will be working on the new design of the web page.

Thank you and happy GTD-ing!

I have been forced to take a long vacation from coding, mainly because of the fact that I had to take care of my kids for long hours during the day. Maybe you know the main feeling of this: Zero free time and in no mood for anything constructive!

Anyway, things are getting a bit better now, I can have some half hour breaks during my afternoons for coding. Since a lot of you requesting information about the forthcoming release I should give you an update.

It’s been a couple of weeks since I’ve started coding again for the new 5.1 version. I’ve decided to loose the zeroes and not use the 5.00.x notation any more. It will be easier for references!

I have already made some changes in the GUI code for better resizing of panels and added an always available preview panel at the bottom of the screen.

My development plan so far, includes better integration and management of projects and a big list of bug and user interface fixes.

I would especially like to thank all of you who keep supporting the project with donations and emails. The project would be dead without you!

I will keep my twitter and facebook feeds updated on every change or addition until the first alpha release for testing, so you can follow me on twitter or become a fan of Jello Dashboard’s facebook page.

Thank you.

Nicolas Sivridis.

After reading some user reports about not being able to add Jello Dashboard as a homepage to Outlook installations working in MS Exchange environment, I’ve decided to find a workaround using the shortcuts collection of Outlook.

The main idea was to create a shortcut for the Jello Dashboard main file, into Outlook, so that there would be an alternative to homepage folders. Outlook 2000 implements this well, since you can go to File>New and select Create a shortcut for a web page.

But things changed since then, and new versions of Outlook have strict security rules for these types of things. Though my main idea failed to be fully implemented, I thought it would be good to share the line of code which will help you create a shortcut to any web page, just like the one Microsoft added there  (the default Microsoft Office online) but gave us no way to add our own web page shortcuts except for renaming and removing them!

• To be able to enter code directly into Outlook, open the code editor using the Tools>Macro>Visual Basic Editor or Alt+F11.
• Show the immediate window by selecting View>Immediate window or Ctrl+G
• Enter the code into the immediate window and press enter:

outlook.ActiveExplorer.Panes.Item(“OutlookBar”).Contents.Groups.Item(1).Shortcuts.add “URL”,”Shortcut name”,1

The code will execute after pressing enter and the shortcut will be saved into your Shortcuts section. You can rename or reorder and add to groups later like any standard Outlook folder shortcut.

For the URL, you can enter any web page and will open into Outlook. You can also enter a local path to any folder to have it opened in a windows explorer window. Unfortunately this doesn’t work very well with the Jello Dashboard htm file. If you enter your Jello Dashboard path to the main file you can open it in Outlook but it would behave just like you opened it in internet explorer, asking you for permission to execute ActiveX content.

Anyway, though this might not be the perfect solution for opening Jello Dashboard inside Outlook, you can use it to add some web pages or folders you use regularly and want to have it easily accessible.

Examples:

• outlook.ActiveExplorer.Panes.Item(“OutlookBar”).Contents.Groups.Item(1).Shortcuts.add http://www.jello-dashboard.net,”Jello Dashboard homepage”,1
• outlook.ActiveExplorer.Panes.Item(“OutlookBar”).Contents.Groups.Item(1).Shortcuts.add “c:\Users\Nick\My Documents\”,”Documents”,1
• outlook.ActiveExplorer.Panes.Item(“OutlookBar”).Contents.Groups.Item(1).Shortcuts.add “E:\projects\Jello 5\jello5.htm”,”Jello 5″,1

Greetings Jello Dashboard users!

It’s been a long time since my last post or code update. The truth is, I’ve been forced to take a long break from coding, due to family reasons (you know, small kids whining, tossing around toys and demand lots and lots of time).

After many questions from users about the compatibility of Jello Dashboard with the new version of Outlook currently in beta, I’ve decided to get a copy and test it. My first impressions were really positive, since everything seemed to work and the whole application was a lot faster than before.

Of course I forgot to add an Outlook view widget, or test my Outlook folder shortcuts with their default view set to Outlook mode!

The views are loading just fine at the beginning and the Outlook view control renders faster too. But when I tried to change view and go to my settings page…

Disaster!

Jello Dashboard came up with a blank screen. Removing an Outlook view widget from the homepage has the same effect.
Strangely enough this bug does not happen in the standalone version of Jello Dashboard, so I am a bit worried now.

Fortunately, the Microsoft Office 2010 version will be out probably this summer, so I think I got time to find out what’s going on.

If any of you, kind JD users, have tested Jello with Outlook 2010 and find that something else is wrong, please drop a comment here and let me know.

I hope this bug (or any others found) will be fixable and you will be able to hear from me soon!

Thank you for your support.

The 6th release fixes lots of bugs and even has to show off some small scale new features!

Thanks everyone for downloading and supporting Jello Dashboard. It may be the best way to GTD with MS Outlook.

Have a great summertime!

Changes (loong) list:

- Fixed: Tag sort order on tree and combo boxes
- Fixed: Go to folder combo box now match international characters
- Added: Tickler popup: Cached list of ticklers for faster rendering. Refresh the list using the date selector button.
- Added: Ability to edit the body text of a tickler or task from the body popup display.
- Added: right context menu to set / change due date for mail and task items.
- Added: Right click context menu for ticklers widget
- Added: “View this Contact” context menu item into inbox and mail folder views: This will open the contact item of the sender.  If ambiguous, a box will popup to allow you to select the correct contact.
- Fixed: Right click context menu behavior didn’t match Outlook.  Now, if you click on an item that isn’t selected, that single item will be used for the item to be processed.  If you right click on any of a set of selected items, all items will be processed.
- Added: When viewing the body of an email, you can toggle the viewing mode between html and plain text using the Toggle view button.
- Fixed: Made the goto box a bit wider and resizable
- Added: Preview panel at the bottom of the action lists. It will use the height and font size of the mail preview panel. Notes, if they exist, are shown at the top of the preview window and display the body of items.
- Added: Using OL2007 and you having notes updated to the body via the setting, notes will be added as text to the body.  They will be delimited with “<– Jello Notes –>” before and after the notes. Any text between the delimiters is treated as notes.  You may edit this text in Outlook.
- Fixed: Smart date bug where format was being reversed is fixed and advanced collect handling of dates was adjusted.
- Fixed: The date field in the form for editing/creating an action can now hadle a 4 digit year
- Added: Experimental setting for using OL2007 “due date” field of email items for storing due dates on emails.
- Fixed: Unknown tags will not be converted in review screen due to tag lost issue
- Fixed: Inbox and Outlook widget’s archive only button not under a menu anymore for better use
- Added: Notification alert when trying to leave collect screen containing uncollected text
- Added: Setting for Outlook view and Outlook widget for OL2007 to display a bit lower so the screentips can be seen
- Fixed: Outlook view and Outlook widget can now process an email with empty subject
- Fixed: Action File attachment and link to action
- Fixed: Advanced settings editor cancel value was dispaying a dev alert
- Added: Date picker customization by the language file
- Fixed: First weekday on date pickers is now Monday as requested
- Added: Setting for sending task requests to assigned action contact (when one)
- Fixed: Inbox counters now showing correct number even if show only tasks in inbox setting is checked
- Added: New setting to select using Goto folder window for selecting folder when moving emails (checked by default)
- Added: Sidebar menu icon to toggle Outlook preview pane easily
- Fixed: Encrypted emails do not cause errors anymore. They show with a lock icon and the user cannot manage them
- Added: Clicking the attachment icon of a message in Inbox view will open up the message
- Added: Shortcut key for refresh (ctrl+S) in action lists
- Added: Closing the Ticklers popup window hides it without unloading data for re-opening speed.
- Added: Alert if no contacts are selected for delegation via the select contact popup form
- Added: Envelope icon and status for delegated tasks sent by email
- Fixed: Inbox and Action editor tag list combo are reloaded after new tags are inserted by typing
- Fixed: Bug caused pop up error msg and tag disapperance When renaming tags
- Fixed: System tags (those contained in the System folder) can be moved like any other tag
- Fixed: Outlook view widget tag combo refreshes when a new tag is added by typing
- Fixed: Hiding Outlook view controls when displayng the Latest form and the Delete task of linked item dialog box
- Added: Archived checkbox for tags. Check to hide a tag from all lists
- Fixed: Error message instead of js error when archiving an item into the same folder it already is
- Fixed: Outlook widget disabling when deleting entries
- Fixed: Improved importing of existing categories as tags from the Settings menu
- Added: Setting to startup to other screens besides home
- Fixed: Creating action from Outlook widget’s email format message body correctly
- Updated: Documentation link no longer appears into the important widget. Moved to sidebar menu.
- Fixed: Setting the jello priority field to high (1) for an action sets the Outlook item to high priority as well
- Fixed: Due date setting on inbox item
- Fixed: Latest window with action editor screen unusable bug
- Fixed: Non-archiving multiple items with custom archive folders
- Fixed: Level up toolbar button for subtags
- Added: Settings function to import existing categories as jello tags from any Outlook folder
- Added: “Make multiline entry” command in Advanced collect toolbar. It takes the selected lines in the collect area and place the line continuation character

Installing Jello Dashboard is a straightforward process. Although the whole process is semi-automatic, the installer and the setup utility somehow manage to do the job. I can tell this from the number of installation related questions from users which dropped to zero.
However, installing Jello for running two instances of it at the same time (using different settings) is not something easy to figure out.

The whole idea is that we need to have Jello installed in two separate folders and then setup each one as a homepage of two Outlook folders and define their settings journal entry name.

This is not so hard as it seems. In fact you could skip the setup as homepage into an Outlook folder step (3) if you plan to run Jello standalone.

So here’s how it’s done:

1. Install Jello twice in two different folders of your systems. Folder A and Folder B.

2. After each installation use the Jello Dashboard control center to fine tune your installation. If you wish to do this at a later time just navigate to each folder, find the install.hta file and run it.

3. From the Jello Dashboard control center, first click on the Set in Outlook button to choose the folder where Jello will reside.

4. Still in the Jello Dashboard control center, click the Settings location button to set up the settings journal entry. The only thing that needs to be done is to change the Settings folder location or/and the Settings Entry Name of the second installation. So you can leave the first installation using the default setting values and just change the Settings entry name for the second one (eg.<Jello.5 Settings 2>).

That’s all you need to do! After that, you will be able to maintain two separate Jello setups with their own settings.

You can also use the Settings location screen of the Jello Dashboard control center to fine tune your single installation. Reasons you want to do this: Your default Journal folder is on a server which wipes all journal entries every day or it’s on a really slow exchange server which freezes Jello.

Some of you might notice that the Jello Dashboard web site and forum were not available for the last 48 hours.

My former hosting provider had a major server accident, resulting in total loss of data.

Fortunately there were some February backups of the web site and I managed to recover my old posts. The Jello forum did not have the same luck. Everything is lost, users, posts and answers. It’s the second time something like that happens.

The new forum is up and running and you can start posting and registering. This time I will not forget to backup things!

Sorry to all of you who are subscribed to Jello Dashboard’s feed. I hope I did not get you mad sending wordpress default posts and older ones in your feed reader or mail.

Thanks for understanding.

Nicolas Sivridis

This release fixes many bugs, but introduces a small number of new features although the users request list is getting bigger!

New Featrures for 5.00.5

• User’s last Sort order is now saved in grids
• A right click context menu to all views!
• Abillity to change theme from the Settings screen/Core combo box (4 themes just for testing for the time being)
• Go to folder function. Fires with ctrl+G from any screen and lets user enter an Outlook folder name to navigate to
• Abillity to manual edit currently used settings. This is intented for advanced users or developers.

*You really should check out the Go to function. Pressing Ctrl+G gives you the ability to immediately navigate to any outlook folder or Jello tag by typing some characters of its name.

Changes for 5.00.5

• Updated: Extjs libraries to version 2.2.1
• Fixed: Issue on tree trag and drop between tags creating orphans and loosing all tags
• Fixed: Advanced collect errors while creating contacts (other contact data)
• Fixed: Cancelling tag creation from inbox combo
• Fixed: Tasks created from Outlook view emails now get body text from them
• Fixed: Inbox error when setting due date on task by popup calendar menu
• Fixed: Outlook view widget Selection/Tag/Archive errors (line 27 etc)
• Added: Extra toolbar buttons on Outlook view widget  (reply,delete)
• Fixed: Narrower tags combo on Outlook view widget to save space
• Fixed: Outlook view widget:Truncate big widget titles
• Fixed: Error generated for tags using the ‘&’ character. & added to the restricted characters list for tag naming
• Changed: Collect popup shortcut key to Ctrl+W
• Fixed: Weekly printout several fixes and it can be now produced from the masterlist view too.
• Added: Weekly printout form new field addition to specify how many characters of the body text are displayed for each task
• Added: if the to line of an email has more than one recipient it will be displayed in the preview pane of an email folder view.  if there are any cc’s, the cc line will be displayed.
• Added: Inbox view is now groupped by type.
• Removed: New tag and up level toolbar buttons from review screen since they created errors or being unusable
• Fixed: Inbox task duplication on due date set and archive
• Fixed:  several fixes to auto-update for the inbox
• Fixed: Inbox move to folder function now uses the go to folder form to quickly search for an outlook folder by typing
• Added: Deleting a task with a linked message results now a confirmation to Delete, Move the linked message or Cancel to leave it intact
• Fixed: Restoring a backup of a settings set retains the original backup and creates another backup of the last used set
• Updated: Search box is now a full panel right above the tree
• Updated: Sidebar toolbar includes Go to function (Ctrl+G) which lets user quickly navigate to an oulook folder or jello tag by typing
• Fixed: Hierarchy sort order of tags is now case insensitive
• Fixed: Bogus tag/folder addition into active list if a new tag was created from the hierarchy (anywhere). It shows now if the current view is the new tag’s parent.
• Added: New setting to mark/not mark outlook messages as read when viewed from jello
• Added: Post it popup now displays and updates the contents of the first post-it widget the user has in the homepage.

Thanks everyone for your reports, observations, supporting Jello by donating, translating and spreading by joining its Friend Connect user list and the facebook group!

Subscribe to feed if you want to be notified on Jello Dashboard’s updates!

I got some requests back to the version 4.00 of Jello Dashboard for digital clocks and gadgets into the homepage. Later, as I was coding for the new version and created the new homepage I though of running a couple of tests using google gadgets without any real expectations.

Then for a strange reason and despite of Outlook’s web browsing limitations some gadgets worked!

After working with some more widgets I have found some ways of using almost any gadget from google’s repository. So you can safely add an Web page widget into your Jello Dashboard homepage and paste the following URLs to their web address parameter:

Clock and date:
http://www.gmodules.com/ig/ifr?url=http://www.canbuffi.de/gadgets/clock/clock.xml

Word Clocks
http://www.gmodules.com/ig/ifr?url=http://www.ljmsite.com/google/gadgets/worldclocks.xml&up_messageid=0&up_mode=ana2&up_servertime=1&up_meetingplanner=1&up_digiformat=12&up_digifontsize=14&up_analogformat=12&up_dateformat=date&up_showseconds=1&up_tz1=UTC&up_tz1name=Clock%201&up_tz2=UTC&up_tz2name=Clock%202&up_tz3=&up_tz3name=Clock%203&up_tz4=&up_tz4name=Clock%204&up_tz5=&up_tz5name=Clock%205&up_tz6=&up_tz6name=Clock%206&up_tz7=&up_tz7name=Clock%207&up_tz8=&up_tz8name=Clock%208&up_tz9=&up_tz9name=Clock%209&up_width=10000&synd=open&w=320&h=300&title=__MSG_Title__&lang=en&country=ALL&border=%23ffffff%7C3px%2C1px+solid+%23999999

Dictionary.com search:
http://www.gmodules.com/ig/ifr?url=http://rmicka5478.googlepages.com/dictionary.xml&up_boxcolor=%23c0c0c0&up_textcolor=%23000000&synd=open&w=320&h=100&title=Dictionary.com&border=%23ffffff%7C3px%2C1px+solid+%23999999

You can test any widgets copying the code from the Google gadgets directory keeping in mind the following rules and limitations:

• If gadgets use any pipe characters into their parameters they cannot be used
• Gadgets using cookies cannot be used. Cookies are blocked by Outlook
• In some cases, not all user defined settings can be used (it depends on the resulted url)

So select the desired google gadget, press the Get the code button and go to the HTML code field.

Copy it to the clipboard and paste it into any text editor

Now you got something like this:

<script src=”http://www.gmodules.com/ig/ifr?url=http://www.matt.org/modules/GoogleClock.xml&amp;up_vsize=240px&amp;synd=open&amp;w=320&amp;h=200&amp;title=Google+Clock&amp;border=%23ffffff%7C3px%2C1px+solid+%23999999&amp;output=js”></script>

Then strip the <script src=” characters from the beginning of code and the &amp;output=js”></script> from the end.

http://www.gmodules.com/ig/ifr?url=http://www.matt.org/modules/GoogleClock.xml&amp;up_vsize=240px&amp;synd=open&amp;w=320&amp;h=200&amp;title=Google+Clock&amp;border=%23ffffff%7C3px%2C1px+solid+%23999999

Try pasting the remaining code into a Jello web page widget and see what happens. Some gadgets won’t accept any user settings (the URL part after the first &amp;). In that case you can try removing all of user settings having a lot smaller URL (eg http://www.gmodules.com/ig/ifr?url=http://www.matt.org/modules/GoogleClock.xml)

Now choose your favorite gadgets and experiment. Who knows? Maybe you will be able to use it inside Jello Dashboard!

There were  several strange and unresolved reports from Jello Dashboard users about a mysterious line 14 error which couldn’t be reproduced. They were not so much, but enough to drive me crazy.

Until one user reported using a Microsoft utility to manage hotmail accounts inside Outlook: The Microsoft Outlook Connector.

I immediately downloaded the product and installed it. Started Outlook and tried to run Jello.

As you can imagine I found an incompatibility with Jello Dashboard. For reasons unknown Jello Dashboard cannot run in Outlook if the Microsoft Outlook connector is installed.

Fortunately, you can run it without problems though standalone using the jello5.hta file.

So if you have been unable to run Jello Dashboard from your Outlook, this might be the reason.