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Introducing the new compose in Gmail
- asadotzler 14y agoIs this really a step forward? It feels a little bit like a step backwards -- more like classic email clients and less like Gmail.
- akkartik 14y agoHmm, how do you mean? I don't see how it's like classic email clients.
- ComputerGuru 14y agoWindowing.
- stephenhuey 14y agoWhat feels the most like classic email clients is the way they abstract recipients by placing the contact's name into a box and no longer display the email address next to it. The pretty box is fine, but I hated seeing contacts on an email in something like Outlook and not being able to quickly confirm which address was used for that contact, so perhaps it'd be better if they had these recipients in a scrollable list.
- a1k0n 14y agoDouble-click the little lozenge with the recipient's name to turn it back into an email address.
- mojowo11 14y agoSeems like a good idea for a Gmail Lab down the line.
- alphang 14y agoIt feels like they are trying to Trojan horse Google+ into Gmail. This change is a step backwards in usability. In an age where people have multiple email addresses, do we really want the email addresses to be hidden? Come on.
- philip1209 14y agoI agree. This interface seems cluttered to me. A live view of my inbox may distract me while I am writing an email. In addition, GMail haas been feeling more bloated for me lately with such an Ajax-heavy UI, and I feel like this could cause further slow-downs. However, I will keep an open mind - this is not a drastic redesign to the overall system.
- jfoutz 14y agoWell... I often need to write emails with specific details from other threads. this is way way faster than save draft, search, copy, go back to draft, and paste. Maybe there's a better workflow for this problem - but the draft saving way sucks.
- s_henry_paulson 14y agoright-click browser tab --> duplicate
- jfoutz 14y agoOnly the most recent inbox is synched, and chat is only in the most recent as well. Unless they fixed that?
- nixarn 14y agoI think it looks great. Many times I've opened gmail in another tab to find some info.
- stephenhuey 14y agoI will enjoy this a lot, because I do often save drafts to go looking for some other message in my inbox. However, I think it saves valuable seconds, not minutes. :-)
- tomasien 14y agoI can see the merits of this, but I'm curious about how it fits into a mobile strategy. My big complaint about email, especially gmail, is that it seems to insist on keeping too many elements from desktop to mobile. My mobile email needs are much more like my SMS needs, yet the UX for mobile Gmail (for example) largely resembles the desktop client. I know that's tangential, but it's what's on my mind regarding Gmail right now.
- alanctgardner2 14y agoThe thing is, who uses mobile GMail? Almost everyone I know uses a native client (Android or iOS). The mobile version of Gmail is definitely a second-class citizen, but I'm glad they're not letting it hold back development of awesome features like this.
- sandGorgon 14y agoThe thing is, who uses mobile GMail? when my wife wants to use my tablet to check her mail.
- cryptoz 14y agoWhich type of tablet? This is solved in Android 4.2 with multiple accounts. You can both use the native client without privacy concerns.
- ConstantineXVI 14y agoTheoretically. That feature's been announced, not shipped. Don't be so quick to rule out privacy concerns on a feature that no one's used.
- MBoffin 14y agoThis doesn't necessarily need to be a privacy concern so much as a user experience concern. She's his wife, not some random stranger on a bus. There's the user experience of being able to hand your wife your tablet and have her be able to pull up her own Gmail in a native app without a bunch of reconfiguration of settings.
- blhack 14y agoGood. The most annoying thing to me about gmail's interface is center-clicking on something (to reference it, like something in a mailing list) and having the entire window redirected. This is cool :)
- fredley 14y agoThis has been one of my biggest Gmail annoyances - having to open a second Gmail tab while composing to do a search. Really looking forward to this hitting my account.
- GlennS 14y agoYou can use Ctrl+left-click to get the same 'open in new tab' behaviour as middle-click. I do agree that broken middle-click is hugely annoying. I'd much prefer they fixed that though, rather than introducing a non-standard popup as the default left-click behaviour. I don't really understand why they hijacked middle-click in the first place. Does anyone actually use middle-click + drag to scroll? I would've assumed the majority have scroll wheels? Is this some accessibility thing that I'm missing?
- Hurdy 14y agoThis was more of an oversight of some other changes than a conscious decision. It's definitely a known issue though.
- acabal 14y agoOn a meta-note, I hate, hate HATE how this blog and G+ blog posts hijack the space bar. I use spacebar as page down and it never works in G+, and it doesn't on this blog either.
- lurker14 14y agoSpacebar works fine for me in G+ Stream page.
- joshmlewis 14y agoYou can still open up emails in the larger view, If I'm not mistaken. I can see and have experienced the issue they are attempting to solve here and this seems like an ok solution. I guess we won't know until we try it. Most emails are short however, at least that should be your goal unless it's something more detailed and then you have a larger canvas to work with.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- marshallp 14y agoWhy is this so important that it reaches top spot in minutes. My links to curing cancer with ultrasound or creating ai get nothing, but the big G opens a new window for compose and it's a giant leap for humanity! Peter Norvig gave singularity summit talk on exciting work they're doing http://fora.tv/2012/10/14/Peter_Norvig_Channeling_the_Flood_of_Data http://fora.tv/2012/10/14/Peter_Norvig_Channeling_the_Flood_... , why isn't that top spot? HN is kowtowing to the pseudo-brogrammer crowd.
- slig 14y agoI guess that more than a dozen of people saw this on RSS and rushed to post here. When you post a link that has been already posted recently, HN upvote it for you,
- crntaylor 14y agoI think that you are confusing "what you want to read about" with "what the HN community wants to read about". It's a pain when your carefully curated submissions don't even hit the front page, but you just have to suck it up and move on.
- guylhem 14y agoLet's see why : - "curing cancer" has been announced many times, and until now every proposed therapy has had at best limited success - likewise, "creating ai" has been in the news time to time. We seem to be always on the verge of true ai and the singularity, but it has not happened yet. OTOH, many people here use gmail - I do, and I have been bothered by this compose thing. To see the issue actually addressed, with proof, and hopefully with an implementation that I can use in the next few days, is more valuable to me that a potential cancer cure or potential ai - especially since I don't have cancer. These are worthy goals, but until there is some real advance, why bother? It's a market economy - someone solving a problem I have is more valuable to me that someone advancing in the resolution of a problem I don't have.
- marshallp 14y agoThe failed cancer cures were biomolecules. This is about literally cooking it with beams, something hackers with a few hundreds in parts could attempt to do. The AI advance is seen as an advance by Peter Norvig (head of Google Research) himself. Both of them are hacker relevant potentially profitable business with huge upsides. Real advances can be made, especially by the hacker crowd. There's too much of a web 2.0 filter bubble going on here.
- jsdalton 14y agoI hate being the guy who sidetracks a thread off the bat by complaining about something unrelated, but... Whatever blogspot theme Google uses for this blog is just god awful (oh, I see, this is it: http://gmailblog.blogspot.co.uk/p/as-you-may-have-noticed-gmail-blog-has.html http://gmailblog.blogspot.co.uk/p/as-you-may-have-noticed-gm...), and I swear it gets worse every time I view a post there. To wit: When I load the page I see the orange "loading" gears. Then that sliiiiides up to reveal the content. Really? Can they really not innovate here? This is a company that spends massive amounts of resources to get their homepage to load as quickly as possible. Heck, they even penalize companies in their index with slow loading times. And yet they purposefully add loading animations and transitions which add at least a second to page load, and probably more as far as time it takes me to engage in the content. Also, every time I reload the page I see something different. Sometimes there is text in the black menu bar. Sometimes there is not. Sometimes there is an "extra" screen that slides up after the orange loading gears, sometimes not. Sometimes the sidebar navigation is there, sometimes not. Try refresh a few times yourself and you'll see. Also, I love the five-second delay for the document URL update when you navigate via the sidebar. All of these fancy, look-we're-using-ajax, gee-whiz-its-a-single-page-app features -- just for a simple blog post. Talk about complicating a simple problem! Again, apologies for the rant but I couldn't even concentrate on what the blog post was saying because I was so distracted by this garbage.
- iamrohitbanga 14y agoThey have a sort of theme roller implemented. Watch the dropdown on top left.
- jrockway 14y agoApparently Blogger customers want this sort of design, so Google tests the themes on their own blogs before giving them to normal users. More feedback, etc.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- JoshTriplett 14y agoWorse yet, they've somehow broken the ability to hit space to scroll by a page.
- iamrohitbanga 14y agoLooks like pushing google plus to all gmail users.
- eric5544 14y agoThat looks great! It feels to me though that google is still playing serious catch-up to it's main competitors (yahoo & microsoft) in the email arena who both have great web-mail solutions that don't get the accolades they deserve. Now all I need is full folder support and I'm happy!
- mikestew 14y agoMaybe Y!, but ermm, Microsoft has a great web-mail product? Are you referring to something other than Hotmail? Because ads aside (bills have to get paid), I find Hotmail to be infuriatingly bad with its UI. Multiple lines of text-only toolbars (hard to find what I want), one text box to search the web and another to search mail (and I always get the web one when searching mail), and just too much non-mail crap on the screen. That said, HM does seem to have some nice features such as a decent spam filter (finally; it used to be laughable) and easy unsubscribe. But bury it under a poor UI and I just dread using it. Or maybe when you say "great web-mail" it's blindingly obvious to everyone but me that you're referring to something else, in which case ignore me. :)
- eric5544 14y agoI'm referring to outlook.com on the microsoft side. You can read more about it here: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444226904577561131545052576.html http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000087239639044422690457756...
- codeulike 14y agoDont you find Labels do everything you need for Folders?
- ggopman 14y agoThe Sparrow team hard at work
- nkurz 14y agoSaving a draft, opening the old email, and then reopening your draft wastes valuable minutes. The new compose pops up in a window, just like chats (only larger). Minutes? I do sometimes wonder where the day goes... Alternatively, Shift-click on compose (or press capital C to with keyboard shortcuts on), and you'll get an actual window that you can move and resize. With the chat mini-windows I frequently wish that I could adjust them, and often accidentally collapse them by clicking in what looks like a title bar. Or if you already have a message open, just shift-click on Inbox to open a new window. Or not --- Google in their wisdom has disabled that to prevent confusing some poor soul with a broken shift key, praise be their servers. But C-n for a new window, ma-return, /search, C-w isn't that bad. I like the idea of minimizing the address area, but don't understand the advantages of the new approach. Is it primarily for tablet compatibility? Or is the concept of windows still considered unteachable? And why are they decreasing support for traditional click modifiers?
- ukoki 14y agoAlso CTRL+SHIFT click compose opens a new email in a new tab (at least on Chrome on my computer).
- nuclear_eclipse 14y agoOr just ctrl-click, or middle-click.
- pkamb 14y agoCritically, though, middle-clicking the Compose button doesn't work (Chrome, OS X).
- anonymouz 14y agoI completely agree. We all have some sort of window manager that deals with handling multiple windows in a consistent way. We don't need every website reinventing window management in their own half-assed manner, that is utterly inconsistent with other sites and other applications.
- 14y ago
- ilcavero 14y agodon't like this at all, it looks like a step backwards, let the windows manager handle windows instead of doing it inside your webapp, next thing you know they are going to add a taskbar on the browser for each open pseudo-window
- munaf 14y agoInteresting that they took this approach primarily for email referencing. Is it that common of a use case that it's worth changing the entire experience around it (and collapsing the formatting bar, etc.)? I'm assuming they tested some sort of referencing UI in the existing compose screen. Wish I could see that. Also, I'm wondering how image insertion works; modals upon modals can be pretty awkward for users. My real pet peeve: can we start removing "Compose" from email vocabulary?
- neopba 14y agoI use IMAP :)
- drivebyacct2 14y agoThis is great. I've hated having to open multiple tabs to be able to reference an old email(s) and compose a new one at the same time.
- codeulike 14y agoI prefer Gmail since its redesign back in April. There, I said it.
- mdonahoe 14y agoDo you have "compact mode" turned on? I mostly like it, except the contact info side bar can cut into my email pane when I dont have my browser fullscreened.
- ImprovedSilence 14y agoI almost like it. I do have compact mode turned on. My biggest gripe with the newer style though is the themes/color schemes. I had my own custom color scheme all picked out in the old gmail, now I can no longer pick my own color for each and every little detail/item in gmail, which irks me quite a bit, as this is an option I used to have. I'm not big on custom background images either, I just want to choose my own colors. But hey, I'm a control freak, I guess most people just take whats given to them...
- munchor 14y agoI like the new one more too, but only because of Compact mode.
- codeulike 14y agoI'm on cozy mode, and with a nice background image. When I looked at Gmail before the April redesign, it always seemed hiddledy-piggledy and wrong-sized. Now it looks much nicer, and I like the 'workflows' on web and mobile. Vast advantage over hotmail and yahoo is that gmail ads are text only. The Gmail logo still looks a bit weird to me; the stretched M always looks wrong.
- Supreme 14y agofacepalm All of the pain points that this supposedly solves have already been solved with tabs. Middle click compose and all of those problems are solved with the added bonus of having an entire screen to write your email in. Google is being taken over by pointy haired managers and marketing. RIP.
- tolos 14y agoI would much prefer to have only one email tab/workspace; it helps me switch contexts. Of course, that is only my opinion.
- threedaymonk 14y agoI seem to recall that both Google search and Gmail were initially popular with technically sophisticated users. I remember proselytising this amazing new search engine to people still using Lycos, or Yahoo, or Alta Vista, or whatever it was back then. I used to be able to get very accurate results in Google search with judicious use of quotes, excluded terms, and exact phrases. Now, Google second-guesses what I really meant, and usually gives me a result that's more generic, more mainstream, but not actually what I was looking for. The contemporary services are better for people who don't understand sets, and who don't really know how to use the more esoteric features of their browser. That's not necessarily bad, but it's bad for us. But we'll cope: there's no shortage of alternative email clients.
- Supreme 14y agoSociety is shooting itself in the foot with the trend of dumbing everything down. While we sit here being presented with one button devices so that "we don't get confused", the rest of the world is busy educating itself to a high standard and building tomorrow's industries. This laziness will be the downfall of the west and we'll have this constant thirst for profit at the expense of society's well-being to blame for it. IMO, anyway.
- Matt_Cutts 14y agoIf you want to mention some recent searches that disappointed you, I'm happy to pass that on to the quality team here. If you're unhappy that Google is trying to autocorrect spelling or add/remove search terms, you might try the verbatim search tool: http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2011/11/search-using-your-terms-verbatim.html http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2011/11/search-using-your-t...
- tolos 14y agoAhhh, it's good to see more useful desktop features making their way online (how old is multi-tasking?). Now we wait for the gmail OS that can run applications...
- iDroid 14y agoYahoo mail has half those features already
- hnriot 14y agoHow is this return to popups any different to the option that's always been present, shift-click to open compose in a new window. Personally, I liked having the choice.
- karpathy 14y agoI welcome this change if they implement it well. I sometimes keep two gmail windows open so that I can compose in one while I reference emails or search in the other.
- dredmorbius 14y agoAnd ... addressing the content of this blog post: yet another reason mutt wins as a mail client. Open mutt (preferably under screen so you can 'C-a "' between mail folders), view message(s) you want to reference (optionally: tag relevant messages, using mutt's filtering tools as necessary, than 'l ~T' to restrict to just the tagged messages, allowing you to rapidly reference a set of messages. Fire up a new terminal window (I bind this to '<shift><alt>t' in my window manager) and write "mutt -s 'subject line'" to start your message, drop into the address lookup window to designate recipients, and edit away in your editor of choice. And all of this without the multi-gigabyte overhead of a full browser session + gmail. Oh yeah: offlineimap means you can work on your GMail account (and/or any other accounts you've configured for mutt) readily. Just sayin'.
- binxbolling 14y agoThat sounds completely doable for 99% of internet users! Surprised my grandma hasn't already been using this exact workflow.
- dredmorbius 14y agoFirst off: this is Hacker News, not Grandma News. How often has your grandmother's mail agent changed over the time she's been using it? One of the reason us old farts have a fondness for commandline and console tools is that they have a strong tendency to remain remarkably consistent over time. I started using mutt in the late 1990s. for the past 13 years, my preferred (though far from only) email environment has changed very, very little. Other than mutt, I've used at various points in time: BSD mail, BSD mailx, cc:mail, various versions of Microsoft Mail / Outlook, Eudora, Netscape, Lotus Notes (ugh!), the VMS mail client, elm, pine, Mail.app, Evolution, Sylpheed, KMail, the Palm Centro mail app, the Android mail app, K9Mail, Gmail, AOL Mail, Microsoft OWS, Zimbra, and others. It's not that I haven't tried the alternatives. It's that when it comes down to it, mutt fits my needs, workflow, and practices better than the others.
- fcoury 14y agoI would really appreciate if Google took some time to work on the speed issues we now experience with Gmail instead of working on this cosmetic changes. I use Gmail basically ever since it was on early early stages (I even pay for more storage for years now) and the degradation of performance is the one thing that makes me think of leaving the service for something snappier.
- mdonahoe 14y agoHow much data do you have? My personal gmail has less than 3gb, and I dont notice any performance issues.
- city41 14y agoI experience performance issues a fair amount in gmail now. The issues are network related. Such as sending a message or just loading your inbox can take forever and error out.
- fcoury 14y agoThat's exactly what I experience on a daily basis too.
- toomuchtodo 14y agoI have roughly 33GB of email in Gmail; I definitely can notice a lag when I'm searching for something.
- Cataclysmic 14y agoWhat gmail really needs to change is the "reply" box. When I'm composing a regular email I get a nice big box in which to type my email. When I'm typing a reply email I just have a little tiny (vertically tiny) box to type my reply. Why?????? So annoying.
- manaskarekar 14y agoDoes anyone have a comprehensive/good solution to how to move all your stuff out of Gmail? Midway while typing this post, I did a search and boom: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3581613 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3581613
- Teckla 14y agoDoes anyone have a comprehensive/good solution to how to move all your stuff out of Gmail? I use Thunderbird + IMAP to sync a local copy of my Gmail email every week or two. It does not sync anything except your email, but even that much is pretty nice, for peace of mind.
- manaskarekar 14y agoI don't use email clients, so pardon me if this is elementary, but is there a good way to compress and archive downloaded emails with their attachments? Also, is the formatting (rtf) preserved?
- Teckla 14y agoI don't know the answer to your first question, but in response to your second question, yes, formatting is preserved.
- chimeracoder 14y agoTo answer your first question: It's certainly possible from a technical level, but I'm not aware of any end-user application that enables this functionality out-of-the-box. One hacky-but-straightforward way to do this would be to take advantage of an email<->filesystem translation like NMH or MBox, and then write some script that would automatically purge the attachments before archiving. You'd still have to download the attachments, I believe; I could be wrong, but I don't think IMAP will let you get around that easily. (To be fair, Gmail's implementation doesn't adhere to IMAP very well in my experience - labels/folders/tags are a major problem - so YMMV).
- qu4z-2 14y ago
- mdonahoe 14y agoDoes anyone else get annoyed when replying to threads with multiple people? I always want to reply to the most recent message, but usually someone else responds while I am composing. So I have to view their message and reply to that instead of to the original message. Does this happen to anyone else, or am I taking crazy pills?
- nollidge 14y agoNo, that happens to me all the time. Gmail used to have a "new messages have been added to the conversation" popup when that occurred, but now that doesn't always happen.
- ImprovedSilence 14y agoDoes anyone know if there's a way to try this out before they roll it out? It doesn't mention anything about it on the blog.
- jmilloy 14y agoUgh. Gmail continues to roll out new features and arbitrary tweaks, yet the bugs impeding normal tasks continues to grow. I've said it before: can I just have gmail beta back? (The main ones for me are the compose window never actually loading, or new messages in a thread not displaying (both requiring a refresh). Meanwhile, the chat hover has changed layout twice. Seriously?)
- kamakazizuru 14y agoawesome! this makes up quite a bit of the love they lost with their abyssmal redesign earlier this year!
- elionchin 14y agoSpeaking on a tangent. Has anybody not found it annoying that you can't auto-BCC yourself in Gmail? Only if you do so does it pull up the message thread to the top which I prefer to keep track of timelines. I would be fine without the BCC as long as the thread reflects my response time. Either way, room for improvement.
- dquigley 14y agoIt seems like many people don't like this, but I had this exact issue last night. And opening another tab takes a while to load simply because the gmail app is so big. So while I'm not sure about this exact implementation yet, it could be a nice feature.
- levesque 14y agoI think they should add a maximize button to this window. Sometimes you just want to edit one email in full screen, and I don't think you should have to revert to the previous interface to do that.
- SquareWheel 14y agoThere is an "expand" button that launches a popup window. You can then fullscreen that window.
- levesque 14y agoFine, but then you have two browser windows. I'm not used to that :P
- septerr 14y agoGood. I wonder if this also addresses the problem when you are replying to a long chain of email conversation, the compose box includes the entire chain while also displaying the chain above the compose box. Very unpleasant.
- endtime 14y agoI've been using this side-by-side with the old UX on my personal account for weeks (months?). Much prefer the new UX. Glad it's finally launching.
- aneth4 14y agoDoes anyone else suffer from EXTREMELY slow gmail. This happens for me across all devices, browsers, and even IMAP. 30+ seconds to load messages sometimes and lots of 17, 317 and 503 errors. I've tried every recommendation, and of course hear nothing back from their support or in their forums. Gmail is almost unusable for me now. Any recommendations or contacts would be appreciated. It seems the only way to get help from Google is to know someone.
- Gotperl 14y agoThis is usually caused by having a lot of devices polling your G-mail account. Go to this link: https://www.google.com/accounts/IssuedAuthSubTokens https://www.google.com/accounts/IssuedAuthSubTokens and remove any that are old/you aren't using. You'll see a speed up.
- aneth4 14y agoThanks. More exceedingly obtuse Google UI. There were a couple apps I could remove with access to Gmail, but doubtful that is the issue.
- 6ren 14y agoor you could just use the old html version of gmail, and open as many messages as you like in different tabs. http://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=html http://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=html
- sethbannon 14y agoIt's amazing, when you ask "why would you need a whole page for composing an email?" there is no good answer. Someone dozens of years ago probably made that decision and it's just stuck.
- r00fus 14y agoDepends. I use Sparrow and despite the coolness of the "mini text area for reply - kind of like an IM response", I often prefer opening the compose in a new window as I might be interested in cc'ing others or sending with options, layout, etc.
- monochromatic 14y agoI like it. I cannot count the number of times I've just popped open a new gmail tab to address this exact shortcoming.
- mememememememe 14y agoAre we stupid or something? First, why the hell are we arguing over the freakin' theme here? Seriously. This tangent discussion should be removed. If you want to complain about the stupid theme, which I also find it hard to use, start your own thread. Secondly, are we stupid for using these annoying shift, control shortcuts? Google is not reinventing the wheel. Google is not used by elite computer programmers. I don't even use emacs because I am a VIM user. GMail is used by over a billion user and most of them don't even know some shortcuts or nice ways to make their tasks better. I don't know all the secrets you guys are pointing out, and are you going to call me stupid? This is not reinventing wheel. It's just making the app more usable. If anyone start spamming me with "you can already do this with X, Y , Z ways but it's not known by everyone...".
- mememememememe 14y agowow I am getting downvoted by haters because I am telling the truth.
- dangravell 14y agoMight be good, but I can't use this until they support canned responses again.
- EdiX 14y agoAm I missing something or is there no way to pick the sender address in the new composer?
- steelaz 14y agoClicking on recipients line reveals CC, Bcc and From.
- sasoon 14y agoI tried it and it is annoying. Compose window is located in the lower right corner of the screen, and cannot be moved to the middle.