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I'm often amazed how Google still gives it staff this unique hacker-like approach to their million dollar projects. For example, the stuff in Google labs (gmai
by supersan 11y ago
I'm often amazed how Google still gives it staff this unique hacker-like approach to their million dollar projects.
For example, the stuff in Google labs (gmail) has had some silly things like don't hit send when you're drunk but sometimes very useful features which may be considered unorthodox like "Gmail telling you when it thinks you wanted to attach a file but forgot".
It's something I wouldn't generally associate with a very corporate design but here they are wanting to add another silly feature and who knows how it will turn out? Maybe it will be super useful and then all the other companies will start to copy it.
But the thing is they're inventing new ways that really don't fit your product development roadmaps. I really like that about them.
- davidw 11y ago> sometimes very useful features which may be considered unorthodox like "Gmail telling you when it thinks you wanted to attach a file but forgot". That one's not that hard. http://marc.info/?l=mutt-dev&m=95685122323646&w=2 http://marc.info/?l=mutt-dev&m=95685122323646&w=2
- teraflop 11y agoDoing it with a low false positive rate (so that you can enable it for everyone without being annoying) is much harder. Also, Gmail has lots of users who speak languages other than English... has anyone tested whether the forgotten attachment detector works for them too?
- duaneb 11y agoPretty sure it looks for the phrase "attach", it doesn't appear to be super sophisticated. Either way it works well.
- leni536 11y agoIt sure works for hungarian, as far as I remember it doesn't catch all synonyms of "attach".
- sdrothrock 11y agoIt works in Japanese, though with more false positives than in English, I think.
- Spoom 11y agoThunderbird does this as well.
- DaveWalk 11y agoAnd Outlook, for many years.
- marcosdumay 11y agoKMail doesn't really work fow many years now. Bu it used to do that too. Now, I don't remember about pine and mutt. They probably didn't.
- MichaelGG 11y ago> "Gmail telling you when it thinks you wanted to attach a file but forgot". Sure, if you use the word thinks. If you instead say "if msg.Contains "attach" then warn" it's not that impressive. The feature in the article is a bit more than a single if.
- Stasis5001 11y agoI just tried sending "Attached is my photo". Then "I've been feeling less attached to you". One warns, the other doesn't. This is also more than a single if.
- TeMPOraL 11y agoNote: GMail actually tells you exactly what it matched to when displaying the warning.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- mmanfrin 11y agoI had a similar thought with Apple -- El Cap has a feature where if you shake your mouse around, the cursor will momentarily grow in size so you can find where it is. That does not feel like a top-down design idea, but a bottom-up feature designed by an engineer who was sick of those moments where he/she had lost the cursor.
- ErrantX 11y agoOh wow! That explains wierd artifacts I've been seeing since El Capitan, when using my trackball mouse. The cursor randomly grows in size, usually when I move it between screens quickly. I expect it's some "random jitter" in my using the trackball that causes it to happen.
- bobbles 11y agoThis might help http://www.cultofmac.com/392027/how-to-turn-off-el-capitans-shake-to-find-mouse-cursor-feature/ http://www.cultofmac.com/392027/how-to-turn-off-el-capitans-...
- elwell 11y agoCase in point why the OS is a terrible place to allow a hacky ethos.
- kuschku 11y agoYes. Popping up a notification the first few times (or the first time after a few months of not using it) would be neat.
- brobinson 11y agoYeah, I thought I was losing my marbles until I saw someone mention it on HN...
- sanderjd 11y agoI love that feature.
- 11y ago
- ikeboy 11y agoI think the attach file reminder is now part of regular gmail.
- vonnik 11y agoWhile I'm sure some great hackers worked on Smart Reply, I don't think it's the result of the process you imagine. Smart Reply is using really sophisticated machine learning to advance one of Google's core goals, which is the creation of an AI and autonomous agents. A chatbot like the kind that finds a response to email is just the first shoe to drop.
- dingo_bat 11y ago"Gmail telling you when it thinks you wanted to attach a file but forgot" is hardly unorthodox considering Outlook has had it for years. That said, the other experiments do seem very informal and fun.
- dexterdog 11y agoI like the attachment recommendation thing and it can be useful but what I find ridiculous is that they still have yet to recommend that you use the correct from address when sending an email to your work contacts. I have about 15 email address that I can send from. If any recipients are in the x.com domain and I am not sending it from my x.com account it should alert me. Better yet, it should just switch the from address for me. This feature has been requested for years now.