It’s been a great two and half weeks since launching Rocketbox. Feedback has been pouring in, and now that I’ve had some time to digest it all, I thought I’d outline what I have on the drawing board. This list isn’t final, and it’s in no particular order. You’ll see these features making their way into Rocketbox over the next few months, and I’ll add/remove as is necessary. If you have an idea for a feature and you don’t see it here, drop me a line, I’d love to hear from you. In fact, EVERY feature you see listed was the result of user feedback, so please send feedback.

Results List View

This has been a highly requested feature, and I’m going to add it. Search results will be available in list form, very similar to how Mail currently displays search results. A number of users have wanted this view for looking through lots of results, or for when they are want to sort by a particular column other than date or relevance. Of course this will be an additional view, and you’ll be able to toggle between the current view with inline previews and the list view. I also intend on making the current message previews resizable, so that should also be helpful when viewing lots of results.

Improved search field

Currently you can switch between Mail’s search and Rocketbox by using a menu item located in the View menu. While this works, I’m not satisfied with it. What I’m working on is a menu in the search field itself. It will work like Firefox’s search field, where it shows the icon of the current search engine and provides a menu for setting the active search engine. Rocketbox will work in a similar fashion with the search options being Rocketbox or Mail’s builtin search. Along with this change, the gray stripping in the search field will be removed.

Firefox’s search field as an example:

Full message previews

This is another highly requested feature and it will be coming soon. I’m going to add a full message viewer to the Rocketbox window. When you select a search result it will slide up and show you the entire message. I expect that this will really improve your workflow, making it easier to look through search results.

MailTags integration

You heard me right, MailTags integration! I’m working with the great folks at Indev on adding MailTags support. You’ll be able to filter your search results by tag, project and more. I think you’re really going to like it.

Actions

After finding a message, quite often you want to reply, forward, delete or perform some other action. Right now this is more difficult than it should be. You have to double click on a search result, and then use the toolbar items in Mail to perform your action. I’m going to make this easier, by including common actions right inside Rocketbox.

Search by domain

Finally, search by domain is coming. I never realized how often users search by domain names like apple.com, or att.net. Rocketbox doesn’t support this yet, but that’ll be changing shortly. I’m beefing up the way Rocketbox handles e-mail addresses and providing support for search by domain.

That’s the current list of major features underway. Let me know what you think.