Browser Pane

Apr 15, 2024

The latest update brings a new type of Pane and a whole new workflow that we're super excited about!

The Email Pane is now the Browser Pane. Expanding on the concept of embedding email apps, the Browser Pane allows you to open any website or web app directly within Legend.

With the Browser Pane you can open any of your favorite websites/apps right inside of Legend and save links into your documents and todo lists. Then when you click the link it opens right back up in the Browser Pane.

The Browser Pane is powered by a new plugin system where Legend can augment websites to integrate them more deeply into Legend. We're starting with a small set of plugins for apps that our beta testers requested:

  • Gmail
  • Outlook
  • Office 365
  • Github
  • Shortwave
  • Jira
  • ChatGPT

These plugins augment those web apps to add draggability to emails/tasks/threads/issues and ensure they create correct permanent links. Even without having plugins, any link on any website can be dragged to Legend to save a link to it.

Some more complex apps need a few tweaks with a plugin to make them correctly draggable within Legend. So if you have another web app that you want to integrate into Legend, or have found one that works well already, and we should include in the "Add New" section, please let us know in the forum thread. We're starting by building the plugins ourselves to find the common patterns, then we plan to open source them and support easily creating your own plugins.

Also, since the last update adding the Email Pane, we've worked with our beta testers to significantly improve the Gmail and Outlook/365 plugins to work better and more consistently.

Many other improvements

While working on this project we also improved a lot of other small things:

  • Improved collapsing in a few different ways
  • Fixed image loading
  • Mobile app is more stable and shows fewer warning messages
  • iOS app updated to fix loading to blank screen sometimes
  • Formatting could sometimes break item links/mirrors

Removed legacy email plugins

The Browser Pane works much more consistently and faster than the old legacy Email plugins did, and since the new Browser Pane plugins are working perfectly now, the old Email Panes have been removed. They've been marked as Legacy for a few months so hopefully this won't affect anyone, but if those panes have disappeared for you, you can replace them with the new Browser Pane.

Mobile

Unfortunately the Email Panes on mobile were broken by Google shutting down a product and were generally unstable, so we've removed them as well in favor of focusing on the rock solid experience of the Browser Pane. For now the Browser Pane is not technically possible in the mobile app, but we're planning to do some experiments to see what's possible.

But of course any links that you've saved into your documents will work fine - they'll open in your browser.

For now we recommend using your normal email app to Star/Flag your emails on mobile, and then process those later in Legend in the desktop app.

Try it now

The desktop app should auto-update itself to version 2.3.0, or download it at https://legendapp.com/download. Then you can add a Browser Pane to try it out.

More to come

If you have any feedback or requests for where we can take this to make it even better, please let us know in the forum.