Hacker News Reader

Comment by DannyBee | Hacker News Reader

It's really interesting to see the super-knee jerk reaction here when the article itself even says that most of the features made their way into gmail.

(I was a heavy inbox user, and i am happy with the stuff that made it's way into gmail).

Outside of some of the bundling features, i'm curious what actual difference people are complaining about here.

View on HN

>It's really interesting to see the super-knee jerk reaction here when the article itself even says that most of the features made their way into gmail.

We didn't just want "most [Inbox] features into gmail". We wanted Inbox's UI and basic approach further developed.

Again, i don't see most comments saying that here.

Can confirm that what I want is Inbox's UI. The ease of postponing items into the "Snoozed" queue, and low-effort addition of task items, are both lacking from the stock GMail app.

I just checked and you can actually set swipe left to snooze in the gmail app now.

It’s not available in the iOS app.

Not surprising, developing new features for iOS isn't Google's highest priority, they're targeting where most of the installed userbase is.

Similar effects can be seen in the OTT market. Roku gets new features from Sling, Netflix and the other OTT players first, with Chromecast and Fire TV lagging by months or years, and these 2nd tier players are missing Amazon Prime Video (Chromecast) or YouTube (Fire TV) respectively. It seems much like the music sales market IMO...

Heh, HN is great at downvoting without making a counterargument :P

The first is available in gmail :)

The reason I still use Inbox on Android, even when GMail has most of the same features is its interface design. I much prefer Inbox's approach where the emphesis is on the email subject instead of GMail's emphesis on sender. 90% of my emails are with the same 2-3 colleauges. They represent different threads for different projects and tasks. Gmail interface makes finding the right email cumbersome. I will continue using Inbox until it stops working.

People are complaining about having to switch apps. Users have found something that works and they've gotten used to it. Now they'll be forced to switch for no apparent value add. Why do you think people would be okay with that?

That isn't the part i'm commenting on.

It's a general statement on the world that people hate all change :)

People have always argued literally every change has no value add for them (and i'm sure for large enough things, there are always people for which that is true).

So that part doesn't bug me.

But that's not what most of the comments seem to be. Because honestly, if the only complaint people have is "i had to open a different app", that's actually really good for any transition.

Change ...

- causes uncertainty (will this still work?);

- often comes at an inconvenient time;

- requires the user to re-learn the software;

- might cause incompatibilities with existing tools.

No wonder people mostly don't like updates, especially if they are forced upon them, and if the advantages are not clear.

Imho, to address the above points, software should let the user decide when they perform the update, and the user should always be allowed to switch back. Note that this might require data to be migrated back and forth, but of course that's the vendor's problem.

Come on. It's one of the essential, fundamental apps/services for many people with all the strong feelings attached to that. For a Googler to show up and start publicly calling users' reactions 'kneejerk' (completely independent of the accuracy of the claim) and then go on to philosophizing broadly on the nature of change amounts to trolling.

Once again Stallman shows that he was right all along.

Deleting/sweeping a section of emails away on mobile is a huge productivity boost for me. The Gmail app on Android doesn't have this feature from what I can tell.

Snooze was a big one too, but that got crippled in Inbox a while ago as well.

The ability to mark emails as done or to pin them were hallmark features of the Inbox interface and they both take significantly more work in Gmail. I'm severely disappointed that they've decided to axe Inbox without at least pretending to care - by eg. providing a user survey.

Oh no, pinning! I've so thoroughly integrated that into my expectations and behavior that I didn't even think about it.

Ack, that just hit me now, too.

I don't use Inbox -- what does pinning accomplish?

Inbox builds on a set of useful primitive ideas, but understanding them is necessary to understand pinning's value.

The central idea of Inbox is that your goal is INBOX ZERO, and that after dealing with any email, you swipe it to the side (or mark it as Done with the checkmark in the web UI) and _do not see it again_. (Like 'Archive' in Gmail.)

The second idea is that your emails are Bundled by category. This is similar to a tag or a filter, but you can choose to have them still show (as a bundle) in the inbox, rather than being filtered to not-seen oblivion. For example, I had one bundle for Pull Requests, another for Jira notifications. The app auto-categorizers things for Finances, Promos, etc, so many of the spam-like newsletters you get will end up bundled together. (Bundles default to only showing things that are not Done, unless you click a bundle's category on the left navigation bar.)

That doesn't sound very useful. What makes it useful is that you can archive/Done an entire category. All of those emails from TeeFury, Newegg, Amazon, Steam, Github, etc that you would normally consider usually-clutter suddenly are SUPER easy to deal with. It basically makes archiving those no longer annoying, as you can do it all at once. Best of all, you see them first, so it's harder to have something get filtered without being noticed.

Pinning prevents you from archiving an item (unless you explicitly click it). This means that you can ping something in a bundle, archive the bundle, and it will archive all the other things, and leave the bundle with that one item visible.

I am profoundly saddened that Inbox is going away. As others have said, it _changed my life_ in terms of how I dealt with overwhelming email volumes at work.

Marking emails as done is just as easy in gmail as it was in inbox (I switched back a while ago). In inbox, swiping to "done" is equivalent to applying the archived label, which you can (in android and web, though apparently not ios), have swiping/closing the email do.

How do you mark a large list of emails as archived/deleted in Android?

Do you mean like selecting multiple (which I believe is possible, but I don't have the gmail app handy to check) and then labelling them all together, or like swiping a bundle away (which there is nothing analogous to I don't believe)

This is what I'm going to miss most. Heard the news and went to check the Gmail app only to realize I was going to have to spend much more time in my inbox.

I was bothered about the same thing but it looks like in the Gmail app you can configure the left/right swipes separately to "Archive", "Delete", "Mark as read/unread", "Move to", "Snooze" and "None". The default seems to be both set to "Archive".

> Outside of some of the bundling features, i'm curious what actual difference people are complaining about here.

Gmail’s horribly cluttered interface compared to Inbox, both on web and mobile.

Unread counts. They make me anxious. I have Inbox only show emails sent to me. Everything else gets bundled and up at 8AM. Inbox doesn't show unread counts anywhere. I don't have to feel like I'm constantly behind.

I think the important point for me is not like "This is a nice to have" or "I don't like extra clicking" it's "This affects my actual health." Literally, it's my health. Not doing this makes people who have mental illnesses like anxiety more unwell.

> Outside of bundling

Bundling is the main development that Inbox brought to the table.

Going to the video tape:

https://gmail.googleblog.com/2014/10/an-inbox-that-works-for...

Three things are highlighted:

Extraction of info from items and display (now in gmail)

Bundles (some made it into gmail)

Reminders, assists, and Snooze (now mostly in gmail)

So i'm not sure i'd agree with you here, but i definitely would agree that of the big three, bundling made it in the least :)

How can I get bundles in Gmail? Am I missing something?

Settings -> Inbox -> Categories is analogous, although IMO the UI isn't as nice. I also don't know if that lets you do custom bundles, although that's a feature I never used in Inbox.

Edit: and the gmail version of bundles has fewer categories than Inbox does

Sorry, not even close. Categories is just automatic folders, every email client has had folders for decades.

Is there a difference, other than bundles are inline with your other emails and categories are accessed in separate tabs?

You cannot create custom categories, you're limited to the 5 options Gmail provides you.

You can't archive all in one swipe.

I for example have all promo emails "queue" up whenever they come in and show up at 9am every day.

I have all "low priority" emails show up at 5pm when I'm winding down my workday to deal with them.

That's the kind of thing I'm going to miss the most.

Is this in the gmail android app? How come I don't see any of this stuff?

> Bundles (some made it into gmail)

Where? “Categories” were in Gmail before Inbox, but there still doesn't seem to be any way to get them bundled in the inbox the way Inbox’s primary display does, though you can set them as separate inboxes.

Inbox users have had all of this and more since 2014, though. And even if Gmail has some of these features the interface is not nearly as natural for using them.

Pressing `T` bringing up the reminders dialog and quickly adding a TODO, then being able to snooze it for a later date.

Gmail has `Tasks`, but I'm not aware of it showing up in the same stream as emails.

I get a ton of email and Inbox does a good job of popping a notification for only the truly important ones. Regular Gmail has the "important" flag which you can train but I get the sense it's not using the same signals or the same algo.

Gmail doesn't have reminders - and my reminders that I've saved and snoozed, many of which are past March of next year will apparently just disappear once Inbox is sunsetted?

Bundling (including the "Trips") is the only reason I still use any google web client. It's not trivial.

same here. trips bundling the one killer feature why I use inbox. I really hope it makes its way into gmail before they discontinue it

I'm with you. That's the only way I'd use gmail. When traveling it's so handy to open up the trips and get all your flight/car rental/hotel details in one small space.

Reminders aren't in Gmail, are they? I don't like having to check two inboxes, multiple times a day. Do you know why Google didn't add reminders to Gmail?

You also seem to believe that more features are always better, but part of Inbox's charm was that it wasn't bloated like Gmail.

Hitting sweep to immediately clear my inbox of all the crap in it that doesn't need dealing with.

Trips.

Using pinning to effect a simple TODO list.

Could you disclose your affiliation in such threads, please?

(Unless you have moved, in which case I'm sorry)

I'm mostly annoyed by the change because the new GMail site takes up twice as much RAM as the already RAM-hungry Inbox site. It's enormous.

I never used Inbox, but this seems like another sign that Google has moved to the next stage in the corporate life cycle; they don't need a testbed for innovative features because they're no longer in the innovation business.

Just because they've finished with the features Inbox was a testbed for (which I am deeply disappointed by because Inbox is so much better than Gmail as a daily driver) doesn't mean they are abandoning that kind of testing approach and have no further use for it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com