We have recently soft-released Desktop Informant Milestone 6 and with that came a change to how Inbox works that is also coming to Pocket Informant on iOS in version 4.8. This change reverts a behavior to that which we originally had, and that which we believe is correct.

Originally in Pocket Informant the Inbox was in essence a Project that wasn’t a project. If you use Desktop Informant you notice that when you pick a project – Inbox is one of the options. This is because according to the David Allen GTD methodology, Inbox is where you quickly collected ideas, thoughts, tasks to process them. Processing them includes putting a date, context, and a project.

However in the beginning Pocket Informant kept a task in the Inbox even if it had a date, or a context – as long as it had no other project. Then around version 3 we changed that so that a task was no longer in the Inbox if you had a date or a context under the idea that it was now “processed”.

The problem came about that now tasks would show their project as “Inbox” even if they didn’t show in the Inbox itself. We felt that this muddied the waters and in general was confusing. We like simple: if it is too complicated to explain, its probably not designed well.

So with Desktop Informant Milestone 6 and Pocket Informant 4.8, we are now moving to our original Inbox design. You can find more information about that here, including a way to work with it.